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Our Protestant 
Heritage 



THREE SERMONS BY 

W. WOFFORD T. DUNCAN 



AT 

EMORY METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

PITTSBURGH. PENNSYLVANIA 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






13 



Copyright, 1922, by 
W. WOFFORD T. DUNCAN 



Printed in the United States of America 



SEP 12 1922 

(^C1A6§1912 



TO MY OLD FRIENDS WHO CONSTITUTED 
THE CONGREGATIONS IN THREE 
CHURCHES TO WHICH I HAVE GIVEN 
TWENTY YEARS OF HAPPY SERVICE, 
FIRST CHURCH, SOUTH NORWALK, CON- 
NECTICUT; SAINT John's, new ro- 

CHELLE, NEW YORK, AND JANES CHURCH, 
BROOKLYN; AND TO MY NEW FRIENDS, 
THE PEOPLE OF EMORY CHURCH, PITTS- 
BURGH, FOR WHOM THESE SERMONS 
WERE PREPARED, THIS LITTLE VOLUME 
IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED, 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Intellectual Heritage of 

Protestantism 11 

The Moral Heritage of Protes- 
tantism 46 

The Spiritual Heritage of Protes- 
tantism 81 



ANNOUNCEMENT 

These sermons were suggested by the 
publication of sixty-five paid advertisements 
in Pittsburgh daily newspapers announcing 
Roman Catholic views of Christianity and 
the church and discussing questions in dis- 
pute between Romanism and Protestant- 
ism. Protestant rebuttal by the same 
method of paid advertising was, to a limited 
extent, and after great hesitancy, published 
by one newspaper and refused by another, 
that other also discontinuing the Roman 
Catholic advertisements the moment Prot- 
estants attempted reply. The Protestant 
people were greatly interested and an un- 
usual opportunity was thus afforded the 
ministers to present to their own people 
Protestant doctrines and ecclesiastical view- 
points which at another time would seem 
tame or academic. Believing in the principle 
that the moment of interested attention 
should be seized for the impartation of 



8 ANNOUNCEMENT 

knowledge, many pastors have embraced 
the opportunity to clarify the thinking of 
their own people and such Roman Catholics 
as might attend, by the emphasis of Protes- 
tant fundamentals without either rabid 
denunciation or timid apology. 

The following statement of purpose was 
used to announce this series: 
Our Roman Catholic Friends have made 
necessary this series. They have earnestly 
and publicly proclaimed in Pittsburgh 
during recent weeks that Protestantism 
is not scripturally nor rationally sound. 
It is their privilege to express their honest 
convictions, but such expression chal- 
lenges Protestantism to reply. The re- 
sponsibility for some reply is with them. 
To ignore the challenge is to admit 
Protestantism to be what they think it is. 
We gladly embrace the opportunity they 
furnish to strengthen the faith of Protes- 
tants, for Protestantism flourishes on full, 
open, honest, and friendly discussion. 
We Have No Purpose to Convert Roman 
Catholics to Protestantism. There are 



ANNOUNCEMENT 9 

more than four times as many Protestants 
and other non-Romanists in America as 
there are Roman Catholics, and with 
these Protestantism is concerned. How- 
ever, we cordially invite Roman Catholics 
to attend. Protestants freely attended 
the recent Paulist Fathers' lectures with- 
out criticism from their church, and we 
invite our Roman friends to return the 
compliment. 

The Preacher Has Only the Kindliest 
Feelings toward individual Roman 
Catholics and has no desire to disturb the 
faith of the honestly devout. What he 
may say in criticism of their church will 
be said in the same spirit that moves him 
and other Protestant ministers to freely 
criticize Protestantism from time to time 
as they feel that there is need. 

To Believe a Lie in Any Realm is Hurt- 
ful. To believe a lie in religion may 
entail irreparable loss. Jesus said: "/ 
am the Truth'^ 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 
OF PROTESTANTISM 

Text: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make 
you free.*'— John 8. 32. 

No age fully appreciates its indebtedness 

to the past. We are evermore tempted to 

walk upon the walls of our own Babylon 

and say, "Is not this great Babylon which 

we have built?'' The principles of thought 

and action which have been born with us, 

the atmosphere of intellectual, moral, and 

spiritual freedom which was breathed into 

us when we became living souls constitute a 

rich heritage for which we are indebted to 

those who have gone before. This heritage 

has come down to us because our Protestant 

fathers fought on bloody fields of martial 

encounter or laboriously contended on 

bloodless plains of polemic strife. We do 

not realize the vast difference in our lives if 

we had been born in a land where the right 

to think for oneseK on matters religious and 

11 



12 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

ecclesiastical had been denied or even per- 
sistently challenged. We do not always 
appreciate the difference between a land 
where the free development of the mind in 
its search for truth is promoted, and a land 
where mental assimilation of prescribed re- 
ligious and ecclesiastical doctrines is the 
aim rather than mental cultivation. It is 
one thing to breathe with our birth the air 
of free inquiry and research; it is quite 
another thing to breathe the atmosphere of 
apprehension toward anything that resem- 
bles intellectual adventure into realms re- 
ligious. It is one thing to inherit the convic- 
tion that the faculties of the human mind 
are to be trusted and that intellectual 
processes which have proved successful 
when applied to physical science and com- 
mercial life may be applied with equal 
success to the religious life, and it is quite 
another thing to view with suspicion all 
normal procedure of the mind in matters 
religious, believing that unless there is 
ecclesiastical dictation, utter confusion and 
alienation from divine truth will ensue. 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 13 

But our American heritage consists not 
only in the fact that we now enjoy intel- 
lectual freedom, but in that, for many gen- 
erations, our fathers have enjoyed and exer- 
cised such freedom. If this freedom had 
come only with the advent of the present 
generation, then a much more limited be- 
quest would have been ours. You cannot 
change a nation over night and the passage 
from darkness to light is always accom- 
panied by the twilight of the dawn. Though 
the people that sit in darkness see a great 
light, they do not pass out of the shadows 
till several new generations have been born. 
It means much, therefore, that as an Ameri- 
can people we receive our Protestant her- 
itage from generations preceding which have 
also enjoyed it. There is a different situa- 
tion, for example, in the Philippine Islands. 
The American flag floats there, it is true, but 
America has inherited a state of intellectual 
and moral darkness which decades of me- 
diseval misrule have created, and while 
constitutional American liberty is guaran- 
teed to all, yet many will for a long time sit 



14 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

in the shadows because their ancestors have 
not enjoyed a Protestant heritage. When 
Paul after his arrest in Jerusalem told the 
chief captain that he was a Roman citizen, 
the captain observed, "With a great sum 
obtained I this freedom," and Paul an- 
swered, "But I was free born." So may 
every American citizen born in the free air 
of Protestant liberty exclaim with gratitude, 
"I was free born!" 

It is this Protestant heritage which we 
propose to defend in the present series of 
sermons. We have no desire to fight over 
again battles of a past day, nor to revive 
ancient animosities which have happily been 
laid to rest. People sometimes ask: "Do 
you think there will be a war in this coun- 
try between the Roman Catholics and the 
Protestants?" and we invariably answer 
"No," for we believe with Tennyson that 
"the common sense of most shall hold a 
fretful realm in awe." But by that common 
sense we do not mean that easygoing indif- 
f erentism which calls all religious strife of the 
past the mere raving of religious fanaticism 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 15 

and which forgets that the very opportunity 
for indifference, which so many embrace, is 
due to the triumph of principles for which 
our fathers died. By "common sense" we 
mean that distribution of intelligent con- 
viction to all people whereby they shall be 
prompt to oppose every movement, however 
subtle, which seeks to undermine the foun- 
dations of Protestant liberty. If such com- 
mon sense shall not abound, and the pulpit 
and the press, because of false liberality or 
fear of religious controversy, shall promote 
popular ignorance of Protestant principles, 
then violence and even war may result. It 
is therefore in the interest of peace and for 
the prevention of religious strife that we 
speak on these themes. Protestantism is 
essentially democratic, and just as democ- 
racy cannot survive without a high degree 
of intelligence, free speech, and popular 
illumination, so Protestantism asks only 
that she shall have the light, that she shall 
be granted the privilege of intelligent and 
friendly controversy, and that for her and 
for opposing systems of belief the Master's 



V 



16 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

prophecy shall be fulfilled and there "shall 
be nothing covered that shall not be re- 
vealed and hid that shall not be known." 

We come now to consider the intellectual 
heritage of Protestantism. The central 
truth on which it rests is the right of private 
judgment; that is, the right of every man to 
think as profoundly as he may and as in- 
dependently as he will upon every question 
of Ufe, including the most important of all 
themes, namely, religion. It is well for us 
to observe here that the right of private 
judgment does not involve two things which 
are sometimes thought to be included. It 
does not include disregard of all authority. 
It does not mean that when a man's private 
judgment is in disagreement with the law of 
the land he has a right to disobey that 
law. The right of private judgment will not 
long continue if such an interpretation be 
placed upon it, for anarchy, to which such 
a view would lead, is fatal to freedom of 
thought. The right of private judgment 
must recognize the right of the majority to 
rule and the independent thinker must sub- 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 17 

mit to majority rule though he utterly 
disagree with the majority opinion. This 
does not mean a surrender of his right to 
think for himself, for that majority rule 
carries with it the right of the individual to 
lawfully dissent from the majority and to 
use all legitimate means to change that 
majority opinion by public speech and the 
use of the press. Nor does the right of 
private judgment mean that each man's 
opinion is to be regarded as of equal value 
with that of every other man on a given 
subject, A man who has never studied 
medicine has no right to exalt his opinion to 
equal place with that of a trained physician. 
But even in the realm of technical knowl- 
edge, where indiscriminate private judgment 
might seem to be excluded, the right of 
private opinion still obtains, for the un- 
trained individual has the right to decide 
what technical authority he will accept, and 
his right of private judgment may be fully 
exercised in the selection of his own phy- 
sician. 

Now, the right to this free exercise of 



18 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

private judgment is challenged by our 
Roman Catholic friends at the point of 
religion. They grant the right in other 
realms, but when it comes to deciding for 
oneself what is religious authority and what 
authority he should accept; when it comes 
to deciding what doctrines, religious and 
ecclesiastical, are true and what are false, the 
individual is told that he must accept that 
which bears the Roman Catholic stamp of 
approval and nothing else. This attitude of 
Rome is defended on the ground that it 
tends to promote that freedom of thought 
for which we have been contending. The 
Rev. Bertrand L. Conway, one of the 
Paulist Fathers, in his "Question Box An- 
swers," a work which bears the oflScial 
approval of the Roman Catholic Church, 
says that freedom of thought in nonreligious 
realms is really promoted by submission to 
authority in the religious realm. He says 
that in the search for truth it is a relief to 
know that questions of religion are settled 
by an infallible authority. The mind is thus 
set free for unobstructed investigation of 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 19 

other realms. Let us look at this. There are 
those who say, ''If the Romanist desires to 
have his religious thinking done for him by 
another, why object, since he is free to think 
in other realms as he may choose.^*' But 
the answer is that religion is not something 
which can be separated from a man's total 
life; it cannot be placed in a water-tight 
compartment and dealt with as though it 
had no connection with his common thought 
and action. Religion is the center of his life 
and relates itseK to every motion of his 
being. AVhen, therefore, one is taught from 
the tender years of infancy all through life, 
that he must not question the authority in 
religious matters of the Roman Catholic 
Church, he very easily comes to accept that 
authority in realms which are not distinc- 
tively religious. He listens to the priest and 
accepts unquestioningly the authorized 
Roman teaching regarding God, the soul, 
and the church. But the priest does not 
strictly confine his utterances to matters of 
personal religion. Some day a political 
campaign is on — a mayor, a governor, a 



20 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

President is to be elected. The Roman 
Church has pohtical convictions. The priest 
voices those convictions. The devout Cath- 
oKc hears that voice, and having been 
trained not to question the priest in rehgion, 
accepts what he may say concerning poKtics 
and surrenders his right to independent 
thought on these matters just as he does on 
reUgious matters, and you have practical 
ecclesiastical dictation in a realm where 
Rome theoretically grants freedom of 
thought. Life is so ^'inextricably mixed'" 
with religion that you cannot surrender the 
right of private judgment in religion with- 
out surrendering it in the whole realm of 
life. 

Herein lies the danger of the parochial 
school. The Roman Catholic Church is 
lauded for that practical devotion to reli- 
gious education which leads it to spend 
millions of dollars for its own schools while 
the public school offers free education to its 
children. Senator George Wharton Pepper,^ 
in his excellent Yale lectures, praises the 

* A Voice from the Crowd, Yale University Press publishers. 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 21 

Roman Catholic Church as the one religious 
group * Vhich has perceived most clearly the 
dangers of a secularized education'' and 
declares that he is ' VhoUy without suspicion 
respecting the motives and aims of our 
Roman Catholic brethren." We have no 
desire to disparage sacrificial devotion to 
religious education wherever practiced, nor 
do we wish to create unhealthy suspicions, 
but we submit that we do not need to be 
suspicious at all; all we need to do is to look 
at the plain facts which Roman Catholics 
themselves are ready to declare. They 
maintain their schools confessedly to teach 
Roman Catholic doctrines. Their central 
doctrine concerning the church is that its 
authority in religion must not be questioned. 
When young people graduate from these 
schools that central doctrine has become a 
part of their mental furnishing. If imme- 
diately on graduation they should be trans- 
ported to Italy, Spain, or some other foreign 
land, then America would not need to 
trouble herself about the parochial school. 
But those young people remain here. They 



22 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

become our trusted citizens. They are 
lawyers and judges and business men, and 
even public-school teachers. Then when 
Rome makes some deliverance on matters of 
state or of international relationship, or 
speaks as did the late Pope concerning the 
Young Men's Christian Association, or ex- 
presses its opinion of Protestantism or the 
liquor question, vast multitudes of our 
excellent citizens recall their parochial 
school training and refuse to think indepen- 
dently on all these questions, not because 
they are distinctively religious questions, but 
because the religious authority which they 
have been taught unquestioningly to obey 
has made a deliverance and they must un- 
thinkingly submit or be false to their 
church. This is the American quarrel with 
the parochial school. We do not cast sinister 
suspicion on honest motives. We simply 
take the plain teaching of the Roman 
Catholic Church concerning religious educa- 
tion, and draw the logical inference. 

We thus see that the right of private 
judgment which Rome grants in nonreli- 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 23 

gious realms is not a concession at all. When 
she denies that right in the realm of religion 
she is practically denying it in all realms. 
Nor are we left to logical inference at this 
point. She frankly admits that she does not 
look with favor on the independent thinking 
of the individual. Pope Benedict XV, who 
has just passed to his reward, declared, "No 
private person, either in books or in daily 
papers or in public speeches, has a right to 
act as a teacher in the church. It is well 
known by all who is the one to whom God 
confided the magistry of the church; let 
then the field be free for him so that he may 
speak when and how he thinks suitable to 
speak. It is the duty of all to listen to him 
with obsequious devotion and to obey his 
words." There is no opportunity here for 
the exercise of private judgment. '"Obse- 
quious devotion" and utter obedience to the 
views of another give no place to individual 
opinion. This is the view taught and de- 
fended by Rome. In the "Question Box" 
before referred to, Father Conway, in his 
lectures to Protestants, defends this rejec- 



24. OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

tion of the right of private judgment. In 
answer to the question ''Is not your doc- 
trine of infaUibiUty opposed to hberty of 
thought?'' he says, "The doctrine of infaUi- 
bihty is opposed to the false Uberty of think- 
ing error, but not to the true hberty of 
thinking the truth."^ This is plausible, but 
not sound. It is true that no man has a 
right to hold as truth that which he is 
intellectually persuaded is not true, but it 
is also true that every man is under obliga- 
tion to hold as truth that which he, in the 
free exercise of his best judgment, has come 
to regard as truth whether it is actual truth 
or not. And, conversely, he is under no 
obligation to personally hold as truth that 
which he cannot see to be true. The fallacy 
in Father Conway's answer appears more 
clearly as he elaborates and illustrates his 
position. He says, "No intelligent man 
would consider himself free to deny the fact 
of wireless telegraphy."^ But the fact is that 

^Question Box, Rev. Bertrand L. Conway, The Paulist 
Press, p. 80. 

8/6id., p. 81. 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 25 

every man is perfectly free to deny the 
existence of wireless telegraphy until he has 
been convinced in his own mind that there 
is such a thipg. It is by this process alone 
that the world has come to believe in wire- 
less telegraphy. The discoverers and inven- 
tors who gave us the wireless never dreamed 
for a moment of convincing the world that 
they were right by a declaration that they 
were infallible. They appealed to our reason, 
and only as men, by the exercise of private 
opinion, came to be persuaded that tele- 
graphic messages could be conveyed without 
wires did that conviction take hold of the 
race. The wireless projectors did not estab- 
lish schools to teach their own infallibility, 
nor seek to raise up a generation that be- 
lieved it was wrong to question anything 
they authoritatively said. They believed 
they had laid hold of scientific truth and 
they flung it wide to the free thought of the 
world and asked men to test it for them- 
selves without the least insistence that be- 
cause the discoverers said it was true it must 
therefore be so. The answer, then, which 



26 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

Father Conway gives concerning freedom of 
thought shows that he does not beheve in 
it. Indeed, he plainly says, in the same 
answer, "This objection is based on the false 
notion that unrestricted liberty of thought 
is a good thing and that every man has a 
right to think just as he pleases."^ It is here 
that the issue is squarely joined between 
Protestantism and Romanism. As Protes- 
tants we believe that unrestricted liberty of 
thought is a good thing and that every man 
has a right to think what he pleases. This 
does not mean that it makes no difference to 
Protestantism what a man thinks. The 
thinking of the world is of tremendous con- 
cern to her, otherwise she would not make 
the presses groan with the tons of literature 
which she constantly distributes, nor would 
she send out her preachers by the ten thou- 
sand to inform and inspire the minds of her 
millions of people. She does care what the 
people think, but she insists that she cannot, 
and should not if she could, do their thinking 
for them. She must teach the unthinking to 

^ Question Box, p. 80, 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 27 

be thoughtful, she must present her facts 
and arguments to all whom she can per- 
suade to think, but she must leave the final 
determination in the hands of the individual 
thinker and wait for his acceptance of her 
religious views until they commend them- 
selves to his private judgment. Protestant- 
ism has no desire for a traditional faith. She 
knows that the man who is a Protestant, and 
a Christian for that matter, simply because 
his father told him to be one is no more in 
line with progressive Christianity than is the 
man a worthy American citizen who votes 
his party ticket simply because his father 
did. The man who counts in church and 
state exercises his right of private judgment, 
and, believing that liberty of thought, un- 
restricted by arbitrary authority, is a good 
thing, accepts the religious or political faith 
that appeals to his rational and moral 
faculties, and is what he is, politically and 
religiously, by virtue of his personal decision 
so to be. 

The difference between the Protestant 
and Roman position at this point is clearly 



28 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

illustrated by the differing conceptions of 
what a congregation is. The Protestant 
preacher looks upon a congregation as a 
jury and feels himseK to be an advocate 
making a plea. A lawyer pleading with a 
jury knows that the final determination is 
with twelve men, each one of whom must be 
free to exercise his right of private judg- 
ment. He comes before the jury not with a 
statement of authority, either personal or 
judicial, but with argument and plea, hoping 
to persuade twelve men to freely agree with 
him. When he quotes the authority of law, 
he argues that it applies to the case in hand 
and trusts the jury will think likewise. So 
comes the Protestant preacher before his 
congregation. He is pleading for a verdict. 
He may quote the authority of Scripture 
and the words and acts of the fathers, to- 
gether with the laws of the church, but he 
knows these avail little unless he can con- 
vince those before him, who exercise the 
right to think as they please, that his 
positions are well taken. If they are not so 
persuaded, he recognizes their perfect right 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 29 

to reject his argument and refuse his plea 
and arise and go their way unconvinced. No 
right-thinking preacher would feel that he 
had won a trophy for his Master if at the 
close of a sermon a man should come for- 
ward and say: "I have Ustened to your 
arguments and your plea. They do not 
appeal to me. I cannot believe your teach- 
ing; the doctrines of Christianity do not 
appeal; but since you claim the authority of 
high heaven and demand that I accept your 
religion I will do so, even though my own 
judgment revolts against it.'' To such a man 
the true preacher would say, "I will be glad 
to present the matter further to you until 
your own judgment shall assent; but you 
cannot be a follower of Jesus Christ, who 
placed such tremendous emphasis on the 
individual choice, and so thoroughly dis- 
counted traditionalism, without reaching 
the place of free and unrestricted choice of 
him through the independent action of your 
own mind and heart.'' 

Now, if the Protestant conception of a 
congregation is illustrated by the jury, the 



30 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

Roman Catholic conception is illustrated by 
a military regiment. The general of an army 
does not make an appeal to the private 
judgment of the soldier. He makes an appeal 
to the recognition of authority. The soldier 
cannot say, "That does not appeal to my 
judgment and therefore I will not accept it." 
He is expected to surrender his judgment to 
an arbitrary authority and follow a certain 
course altogether apart from his own 
opinions. He belongs to the company whom 
Tennyson immortalizes in his "Charge of 
the Light Brigade": 

"Theirs not to make reply. 
Theirs not to reason why. 
Theirs but to do and die." 

This is I true military submission to 
authority. The Roman Catholic congrega- 
tion is not expected to reason why nor make 
reply when the authorized representative 
of the church speaks. The priest does not 
await a verdict; he awaits obedience. It is 
not reason but command that rules. Not 
that the devout communicant is expected 
to be thoughtless, any more than the 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 31 

obedient soldier is to be unthinking, but 
each is expected to adjust his thinking to 
processes preconceived and authoritatively 
declared. 

This position of the Roman Catholic is 
not one of choice but of necessity. The 
superstructure of Rome cannot stand if this 
foundation stone be removed. Just notice 
how carefully the system is guarded at this 
point. There is practically no chance what- 
ever for that free spirit of investigation and 
individual judgment which is the glory of 
our American life. The death of Pope 
Benedict XV has called our attention to the 
papal power. For our Roman Catholic 
friends in their sorrow over the death of 
their official head we have the most sincere 
sympathy and have been glad to remember 
them in public prayer this evening. Millions 
of devout men and women throughout the 
world have suffered bereavement and we 
have no disposition to add any bitterness to 
their cup of sorrow. Our reference to the 
Pope is solely to the method of his election 
and that of his successor. He is elected by a 



32 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

college of seventy cardinals. This body has 
been appointed by a Pope. In it there is not 
the slightest representation of the Roman 
Catholic laity. No one who is not an official 
clergyman of the church can have any voice. 
The Pope so elected is the supreme watch- 
man on the walls of Romanism. He per- 
sonalizes the careful system of close scrutiny 
by which all activities of that church can be 
seen almost instantaneously. Let a bishop 
or archbishop reveal the slightest tendency 
toward progressive ideas; let him advocate 
the right of Roman Catholic laymen to be 
heard in the official councils of the church, 
let him criticize, ever so calmly, the action 
of his ecclesiastical superiors, and the Pope 
may remove him without delay. Further- 
more, the laws which govern the Roman 
Catholic Church are expressive only of the 
clerical mind. The lawmaking body of 
Romanism has not the slightest lay repre- 
sentation. The rank and file of the member- 
ship of the church have no voice whatever 
in determining what laws shall govern it. 
The laws of the church in the United States 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 33 

are made by the national or plenary coun- 
cils, three of which were held during the 
nineteenth century. The voting member- 
ship of these councils is confined exclusively 
to the bishops. The parish priesthood, 
which is the most democratic element in the 
clerical body, has no voice whatever, to say 
nothing of the layman. Even this episcopal 
legislation is subject to the approval of the 
Pope. When, therefore, you eliminate 
wholly the voice of the common people, ex- 
clude even the common priesthood, cause 
the lawmaking body to consist exclusively 
of bishops, make even their legislation sub- 
ject to the approval of the Pope, require 
that he be elected by a small body composed 
of cardinals whom a preceding Pope has 
appointed, and then make the Pope the 
absolute ruler of the whole church with no 
check on his power, it is easy to see that 
democracy with its attendant right of 
private judgment has no place whatever in 
the Roman system. 

Now, Rome does not thus exclude de- 
mocracy simply because of choice, but from 



34 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

sheer necessity. It is evident that if she 
should once admit the right of private judg- 
ment, her system would fall to the ground. 
It has been well said that if Rome should cut 
her little finger she would bleed to death. 
Once throw open the doctrinal and ecclesi- 
astical system of Rome to common demo- 
cratic debate, and subject to the common 
rules of research and reason her dogmatic 
insistence upon divine right, and that sys- 
tem could not endure. Examine the reason- 
ing by which she supports her claim to be 
the only oflScial representative of Jesus 
Christ upon earth. Father Conway is asked, 
"Is not your church a spiritual despotism in 
which men must surrender their private 
judgment in religion to men like them- 
selves.?"^ He replies in his oflScial ''Question 
Box'' that this would be the case if one sub- 
mitted to the authority of a church founded 
by Calvin or Wesley, but it is not the case 
if he surrender his reason to the Roman 
Catholic Church. When we ask why this 
distinction, he replies that the Calvinistic or 

^Question Box, p. 83. 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 35 

Methodist Church is not authorized by 
Jesus Christ, but that the Roman Catholic 
Church is so authorized. When we press him 
for proof he simply quotes the words of the 
Master, "He that heareth you, heareth me''; 
"As the Father hath sent me, I also send 
you"; "He that despiseth you, despiseth 
me." The tremendous leap by which he 
passes from logic to unsupported assump- 
tion he does not explain. The most fantastic 
folly could be proven by similar disregard of 
the common rules of logic. Now, we submit 
that if the rational grounds of Rome's as- 
sumption of authority were subjected to the 
decision of the common mind and the same 
rules of reasoning observed which a lawyer 
in court or a business man at a directors' 
meeting must employ, the irrational char- 
acter of her assumption of authority would 
appear and her ecclesiastical system would 
either fall to the ground or undergo radical 
revision. Rome is therefore fighting for her 
own life when she opposes the right of 
private judgment. She cannot in the very 
nature of the case be friendly to this vital 



36 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

element of our Protestant heritage. With all 
personal friendliness toward individual 
Roman Catholics and all antagonism toward 
rabid rancor and persecuting prejudice, we 
must not shut our eyes to the plain fact that 
the right of every man to think for himself, 
which is the core of democracy and of 
Protestantism, is something to which Rome 
can never reconcile herself so long as she 
remains what she is to-day. 

Behind these opposing attitudes of Ro- 
manism and Protestantism lie two opposite 
theories of the human mind and its out- 
workings. The Protestant theory of the 
mind of man is that it is trustworthy and 
that if the mental faculties are properly 
developed and the moral and spiritual nature 
filled with the spirit of Christ, those intellec- 
tual faculties will, in their free exercise, find 
the truth. Jesus challenged men to this free 
exercise, when he said "Seek and ye shall 
find/' and when he appealed to men on 
multiplied occasions to exercise their reason- 
ing powers even with reference to his own 
divinely authoritative deliverances. Now, 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 37 

the Roman theory is that the free exercise of 
the reasoning powers of man will lead first 
to confusion and ultimately to fundamental 
error. Just as the Roman distrust of the 
physical endowments of the race leads her to 
regard marriage as a concession to weakness 
and to laud the celibate state as more holy, 
so the distrust of the intellectual faculties 
leads her to dictate the thinking of her 
people as far as she is able. Protestantism 
believes that both the physical powers and 
the intellectual faculties are trustworthy, 
and that when the heart is clean their 
normal exercise is not only approved but 
required by God. The Protestant theory 
stands well the pragmatic test of experience. 
The free exercise of the mental powers does 
not lead to that confusion of mind on reli- 
gious matters with which Protestantism is so 
often charged. Father Conway tells non- 
Catholics that they ^'cannot agree among 
themselves about the most fundamental 
doctrines of Christianity.''^ This statement 
is a most thoroughgoing misrepresentation 

^Question Box, p. 81. 



38 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

of Protestantism. The fact is that all the 
great Protestant denominations are in essen- 
tial agreement on the fundamental doctrines 
of Christianity. All believe in the deity of 
Christ, the inspiration of the Scriptures, 
salvation through the crucified Redeemer, 
the resurrection of Jesus, the gift of the 
Holy Spirit, institutional Christianity as 
represented by the Christian Church, the 
immortality of the soul, reward and punish- 
ment after death. Not only does Protes- 
tantism agree on the fundamentals, but on 
methods of work it is essentially one. The 
* 'Federal Council of the Churches of Christ 
in America" is a union movement in which 
all the large denominations of Protestant- 
ism unite. United Protestantism promotes 
evangelism, has adopted a social creed, and 
is working to promote home and foreign 
missionary activities of an evangelistic, edu- 
cational, and philanthropic character. Even 
in the secondary realm of church polity 
there is unity, for clergymen and laity pass 
easily from church to church, with mutual 
recognition of ministerial orders and lay 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 39 

membership in harmony with the prayer of 
Jesus "that they all may be one." Now, this 
unity of Protestantism means much more 
than a similar unity in Roman Catholicism, 
for it is a spontaneous unity. Protestantism 
has no Pope, no college of cardinals set on 
its walls to detect the slightest dissent and 
immediately correct it. The Protestant 
churches have been more eager for religious 
liberty than for religious unity. They have 
invited the fullest discussion and have 
encouraged, as some think excessively, the 
disposition to form new church organiza- 
tions out of small groups which differ from 
the main body on matters which seem to 
them important. Yet with all this free 
exercise of the right of private judgment 
Protestantism finds itseK to be essentially 
one on the fundamentals of Christianity and 
even on multitudes of matters which are not 
fundamental. Is not this genuine scriptural 
unity.? Do we not claim supernatural super- 
vision of the Old Testament writers because 
so many different books came from the 
minds of so many different authors who were 



40 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

widely separated and who started with no 
purpose to produce one harmonious volume? 
The absence of plan to unite reveals the 
unifying power of truth. Why not, then, 
credit Protestantism with similar super- 
natural guidance when, with no purpose to 
agree, the different denominations have come 
to such essential agreement? This is surely 
high testimony to the trustworthiness of the 
intellectual faculties of man. The search for 
truth, when undertaken with pure motive 
and unfettered mentality, is surely approved 
of God and brings the seeker into harmony 
with him who is the Spirit of truth. We are 
not here, even by inference, disparaging the 
necessity of a divine revelation, for the end 
of that revelation is to renovate the moral 
nature of man, emancipate his mind from 
the bondage which sin of the heart always 
imposes, and set him free to seek the truth. 
This leads us to the practical question 
which is agitating Romanism and Prot- 
estantism alike to-day, Should the historical 
textbooks in the public school be rewritten? 
The unwilhngness of Rome to trust the in- 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 41 

tellectual nature of man makes her suspi- 
cious of every scientific historian. Her 
conception of an historian is that he shall be 
a man who has submitted to the authority 
of the Roman Catholic Church and who 
writes as an apologist for that church and 
as a propagandist for Romanism. Prot- 
estantism does not want an historian to be 
either an apologist or a propagandist. She 
wants him to lay bare the actual facts of 
history without reference to the help or hurt 
which those facts may occasion any cause. 
Protestantism is, therefore, in complete 
sympathy with the policy which the public 
school has thus far followed in seeking 
accuracy of statement and reliability of 
authorship above all else in the historical 
textbooks which are placed in the hands of 
youth. Rome gives abundant evidence that 
she does not believe in this policy. One of 
her latest apologists, Edward Ingram Wat- 
kin, in his book SoTrie Thoughts on Catholic 
Apologetics y quoted by Professor Henry C. 
Sheldon, of Boston University, says: "Of 
the great thi^kers who have acknowledged 



42 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

the authority of the church, the majority 
have been, and are, men of metaphysical 
rather than of historical minds, men who 
prize the static element of experience more 
than the dynamic. Moreover, among the 
ancients (with few exceptions) and in the 
Middle Ages, history was in a very poor con- 
dition, since the historical sense, as we 
understand it, was simply nonexistent. The 
apologist ought in all honesty to admit this." 
This has long been the contention of Prot^ 
estants. They have known many cases 
where Roman Catholicism has approved his- 
torical statements which were made by meta- 
physical apologists for Rome rather than un- 
biased scientific historians. Professor David 
S. Schaff quotes a number of historical in- 
accuracies which have been proclaimed as 
truth, due doubtless to the dominance of the 
metaphysical over the historical cast of 
mind which Watkin admits in Roman 
Catholic historians. The present manhood 
and womanhood of France were taught in 
their youth that the Huguenots were trai- 
tors to their king, Louis XIV, and that in 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 43 

emigrating from France they despised their 
native country. 

The historical sense was certainly lacking 
in the historian who prepared those Roman 
Catholic textbooks. Those Roman Catholic 
prelates in Washington last fall who pro- 
nounced the Irish people "the most apostolic 
race in history," and Mayor Curley, of 
Boston, who described the Pilgrim Fathers 
as a company of "tramps," were likewise 
sadly lacking in the historical sense of ac- 
curacy. Father Conway in his "Question 
Box" shows a sad disregard of historical 
accuracy when he states on page 121 that 
Protestant success in reaching pagan nations 
"has been ridiculously small, as its own 
ministers testify," and then quotes from 
articles written in the Fortnightly Review and 
the Nineteenth Century in the year 1888 and 
an article in the "Dublin Review," written 
in January, 1889. If Father Conway has not 
read anything concerning the success of 
Protestant missions since 1888 or 1889, he 
certainly cannot speak with historical accu- 
racy on the subject. Yet the book in which 



44 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

this is found is given to non-Catholics in 1921 
as a present-day answer to their inquiries! 

In view of the manner in which our Ro- 
man Cathohc friends handle the sacred 
treasures of historical truth, Protestants are 
justified in viewing with alarm their pro- 
posal to rewrite the historical textbooks for 
our public schools. 

It is not easy to ascertain truth. It is 
difficult to be historically accurate. The 
question has been raised "Can we tell the 
truth?" We need to join all the forces that 
make for truth and rebuke every tendency 
to erroneous statement and historical mis- 
representation. The Church of Christ 
should be ever the pillar and ground of 
truth. Protestantism does not profess to 
have been faultless in fidelity to truth, but 
she does claim to have fostered independent 
thinking on the part of the individual and to 
have cultivated a disposition to protest 
against arbitrary dogmatism. Having pro- 
moted these forces, she has encouraged a 
spirit which tends to correct her own mis- 
takes. She has thus ever been a thorn in the 



THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 45 

side of every institution claiming immunity 
from criticism and arrogating to itself dog- 
matic authority. It is a pity when a great 
church which claims to be the representative 
of Christ on earth discourages independent 
thinking and critical research, for these have 
not only contributed greatly to the ascer- 
tainment of scientific truth, but they are 
plainly corrective of a thousand shams 
which have plagued the world. The dis- 
position to falsify is alarmingly prevalent. 
All genuine progress lies along the path of 
truth. Truth is the emancipator, says the 
One who is the truth. The Protestant 
heritage of truth and the right of the indi- 
vidual to search for it, unhampered by 
ecclesiastical dogmatism and regardless of 
consequences, must be maintained if the 
church and the nation shall press forward to 
God's goal of triumphant truth; for, as 
Bryant sings 

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again: 
The eternal years of God are hers; 
But error, wounded, writhes in pain. 
And dies among his worshipers.'' 



n 



THE MORAL HERITAGE OF 
PROTESTANTISM 

Text: "And herein do I exercise myself, to have always 
a conscience void of offense toward God and toward men/' — 
Acts 24. 16. 

The moral heritage of Protestantism is 
closely allied to the intellectual heritage. 
We saw that the corner stone of the intellec- 
tual heritage was the right of private judg- 
ment. We find that the moral heritage like- 
wise has a corner stone: it is liberty of 
conscience. Just as the Protestant insists 
that a man has the right to think for himself 
and refuse to accept as intellectually sound 
that which does not seem reasonable to his 
own mind, so the Protestant also claims that 
a man has a right to refuse to believe any- 
thing to be right until his own conscience 
shall approve it. We hold that the determin- 
ing factor in morals is the vigorous exercise 
of a man's conscience just as the determining 

46 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 47 

factor in intellectual life is the free exercise 
of the individual mind. The right of private 
judgment and the right to free exercise of 
one's own conscience go hand in hand. 

Liberty of conscience, like the right of 
private judgment, needs a certain degree of 
qualifying definition. What is this con- 
science for whose liberty we stand? Some 
will answer that it is the voice of God in the 
soul of man. This answer is too general. If 
by "the voice of God" is meant that every 
specific course which the conscience ap- 
proves is that which is right in the abstract 
and is in every particular what God would 
have the individual do, we cannot accept 
the definition. For conscience approves the 
conduct which the individual thinks is right 
and even when the individual is wrong, but 
honestly thinks he is right, conscience ap- 
proves. Thus the pagan mother thinks it is 
right to cast her child into the sacred river 
as an act of devotion, and her conscience 
approves an act which in itself is abhorrent 
to God. It cannot be said that her approv- 
ing conscience is the voice of God speaking 



48 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

in favor of child murder. And yet God does 
most certainly approve of the sacrificial 
obedience of the individual to his honest 
convictions. The fact is that conscience is 
the voice of the moral nature speaking its 
approval of conduct which is in harmony 
with that individual's honest convictions. 
That moral nature is itself the medium 
through which God speaks to man, so that 
the motions of the moral nature are pro- 
duced by God even though their expression 
by the conscience may not accurately repre- 
sent the divine mind. Perhaps the best 
illustration is found in the radio broadcast- 
ing which is now occupying the popular 
mind. When we listen at the receiving end 
we sometimes hear very imperfectly the 
voice of a speaker. We cannot understand 
clearly what he says. Indeed, we may mis- 
understand him and conclude that he is 
saying just the opposite of that which is on 
his lips. The fault is with our receiving set 
which is the work of an amateur and does 
not permit the speaker to be heard dis- 
tinctly. But the fact is that whatever we do 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 49 

hear through that receiver is caused by the 
speaker at the other end whose exact mean- 
ing is distorted because of the imperfect 
instruments which we use. So with the 
conscience. It is imperfect until it has had 
Christian enhghtenment and training, and 
the voice of God which speaks through the 
moral natiu'e cannot be distinctly heard nor 
correctly understood until the medium of 
communication is perfect, but it is still true 
that whatever movements are stirring in the 
moral nature of the individual are occa- 
sioned by God who is seeking to express him- 
self clearly to our minds and hearts. In a 
limited sense it may therefore be said that 
conscience is the voice of God, but in the 
unlimited sense of the exact conveyance to 
the individual of the thought and will of the 
Divine Being, it is not his voice. It will thus 
be seen that in emphasizing the right of the 
individual to the free exercise of his con- 
science we are not excusing any disregard of 
such guidance and help as the church and 
the Bible furnish. While his conscience is to 
be his guide, he is under obligation to en- 



50 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

lighten that conscience by every means at 
his command, and the church is one of the 
divinely appointed luminaries on the road 
to righteousness which he cannot afford to 
ignore. 

Again it must be remembered that liberty 
of conscience means the right to give con- 
science its fullest exercise. The freedom 
which it needs is the freedom to act, not to 
be passive. A man has no right to ask that 
his conscience be freed from the domination 
of others simply that he may enslave it 
himself. The liberty of conscience for which 
our fathers fought was the liberty to scruti- 
nize every moral demand with the utmost 
moral diligence to ascertain if its demands 
were those of God. The indolent conscience, 
the sleeping conscience can know no true 
liberty and is entitled to none. 

Regarding conscience, then, as the voice 
of that moral nature through which God 
seeks to speak, and understanding its free- 
dom to be the opportunity of unrestricted 
search for moral right, let us pause for a 
moment and see how great is this moral 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 51 

heritage and how vital a part it has had in 
shaping the free institutions of America. 

The Pilgrim Fathers gave us our Ameri- 
can institutions. It has become popular in 
some circles to-day to discount the Pilgrims 
and to tell us how much more highly we 
have thought of them than we ought to 
think. It is quite true that our American 
institutions, in exactly their present-day 
form, did not come over in the Mayflower, 
but it cannot be denied that the nearest ap- 
proach to those institutions in all the world 
of that day was made by the Pilgrim Fathers 
when they founded and promoted Plymouth 
colony. Bancroft says substantially that the 
document drawn up and signed in the cabin 
of the Mayflower was the most advanced 
statement of constitutional democracy then 
extant. The germ of this constitutional 
liberty was found in the Pilgrims' insistence 
on liberty of the individual conscience. The 
quarrel of these men with the English gov- 
ernment was concerning the divine right of 
kings. The ruling monarchs of that day 
insisted that the king reigned by divine 



52 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

right and that to dissent from his dictum 
was to array oneself against God. The 
Pilgrims denied this. In so doing they broke 
with the Anglican Church as well as the 
state, for episcopacy was the bulwark of 
royal autocracy, and the two stood or fell 
together. Because of this protest against 
ecclesiastical and royal autocracy the Pil- 
grims were persecuted. Having much in 
common with the Puritans, the Pilgrim 
Fathers were much more definite in the 
claim that no king and no ecclesiastic had a 
right to supplant the individual conscience. 
They became the protestants of the Puri- 
tans, went to Holland, were more thor- 
oughly indoctrinated in the sanctity of 
conscience by the teaching of their pastor, 
the Rev. John Robinson, and, as Silvester 
Home put it, took so seriously the teaching 
of Robinson that government should be 
founded on the free exercise of the intensified 
and instructed conscience, that they, one 
day, rose up and fled to America that they 
might make the great experiment. Here 
they formed a government of the people. 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 53 

The town meeting where all might speak, 
and not the royal chamber, was the place 
where laws were made. The church and 
state were separated in that nonchurch 
members might vote. Miles Standish, who 
never joined the church, exercised the fran- 
chise. The persecution of the witches with 
which the Pilgrims have been charged, did 
not occur in their colony but in that of the 
Puritans, who were the aristocrats among 
the colonists. Though the Pilgrims were 
plain country folk, they believed thoroughly 
in popular education. Here, then, are 
American institutions in embryo — separa- 
tion of church and state, popular education, 
legislation by the people, aversion to perse- 
cution, opposition to ecclesiastical as well as 
royal autocracy, all these resting on the 
foundation stone of liberty of conscience. 
This is our American heritage: this is our 
Protestant heritage. Those who do not ap- 
preciate the one discount the other. It is 
not surprising that Roman Catholicism pre- 
fers "The Star-Spangled Banner'' to our 
national anthem, since the latter sings con- 



54 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

cerning the "land of the Pilgrims' pride'' 
and evermore reminds us of our inherited 
opposition to ecclesiastical as well as mon- 
archical rule. 

Our Roman Catholic friends are taught 
that liberty of conscience as we understand 
it is not a good thing. When viewed from 
the standpoint of individual exercise it has 
received the papal denunciation, being 
characterized as man's madness and not his 
right. "Liberty of conscience is liberty of 
perdition" is a quotation from Roman 
Catholic sources. It is true that in the lec- 
tures to Protestants we find quotations 
which indicate the opposite view. We read 
that Pope Innocent III declared that "what- 
ever is done contrary to conscience leads to 
hell,"^ and that Saint Thomas said, "He who 
acts against conscience sins."^ But even in his 
appeal to Protestants the Roman apologist 
reveals a different understanding of obe- 
dience to conscience from that which Prot- 



1 Question Box, p. 91. 
« Ibid,, p. 92. 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 55 

estantism maintains. The Romanist always 
has in mind a conscience which has already 
yielded itself to the authority of the church, 
and which has been instructed that the 
Roman Catholic Church is the sole mouth- 
piece of God on earth. A conscience so 
instructed can only point to the church, and 
its warning is always against departure 
from the teachings of that church, just as 
the conscience of the heathen woman warns 
her against departure from heathen prac- 
tices in which she has been instructed from 
infancy. It is quite another thing to approve 
the action of a conscience which has been 
taught to freely exercise itself regarding 
every question, even the authority of the 
church and of the Scriptures. Such free 
exercise of conscience Rome does not ap- 
prove, as appears from further study of the 
same lectures to Protestants by Father 
Conway to which we have frequently re- 
ferred. He says that if we were to "'allow 
reason, subject as it is to public opinion, 
caprice, passion, prejudice, to speak in its 
own name, the whole basis and sanction of 



56 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

the moral order would at once disappear." 
He is here answering a question concerning 
conscience as a sufficient guide for man. He 
defines conscience as ^*reason/' telling us 
what is good or bad, and he plainly means 
that if conscience were left to act with per- 
fect liberty, the basis of the moral order 
would disappear. Here is definite opposition 
to the free exercise of conscience. It is 
honest opposition, no doubt, but opposition 
due to a false moral philosophy which Rome 
persistently teaches. Her teaching invari- 
ably is that there can be no healthy moral 
development without unquestioning sub- 
mission to arbitrary religious authority. 
Her position on this subject is still more 
clearly set forth when she speaks concerning 
the right of the Roman Catholic Church to 
command the temporal power for the teach- 
ing and enforcement of her doctrines. Her- 
genrother declares: "The church rejects the 
principle of free investigation which makes 
reason the judge over God's utterances and 

^Question Box, p. 5. 

* Sacerdotalism in the Nineteenth Century, Henry C. Sheldon, 
p. 34. Eaton & Mains. 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 57 

her own teaching office. . . . She rejects 
in principle the freedom of all worships. 
Freedom of worship is in itself an evil.''^ 
Devivier, speaking of liberty of conscience, 
liberty of the press, liberty of education, 
says: "They are false in principle. The 
Catholic religion alone is true and binding 
upon all men, and this religion is identified 
with the Roman Catholic Church." He 
adds : "Neither the church nor the state can 
be taxed with intolerance and tyranny when 
they seek, as they did in the Middle Ages to 
regulate the exercise of the human will, and 
to diminish for men the facilities for evil and 
thus prevent them from risking their happi- 
ness and welfare."^ This is surely ecclesi- 
astical paternalism which has no place in 
modern democracy and which abhors liberty 
of conscience. These official statements of 
the Roman attitude toward the free exercise 
of conscience need to be kept in mind when 
Paulist Fathers tell non-Catholics that 
Roman Catholicism believes in the exercise 
of conscience. 

Ubid., p. 35, 



58 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

Now, the failure to give the conscience of 
the individual full liberty leads to the sub- 
stitution of the law of expediency for the 
law of moral right. Only as we keep the 
conscience in the ascendency and grant it 
freedom to press its persistent question, con- 
cerning every proposition, "Is it right?'' will 
we be saved from the entanglements of 
casuistry which are fatal to wholesome 
moral attitudes. If service to an institution, 
however worthy, shall come to be regarded 
as of greater value than obedience to the 
clear demands of conscience, then the rule 
of expediency masters us. This is the point 
at which Romanism endangers our moral 
heritage. The promotion of the interests of 
the church is more precious to her than 
strict obedience to the voice of conscience. 
Thus while she probably would not directly 
ask an individual to do wrong in defense of 
the church, yet many are without doubt led 
to this course in practical life because of her 
teaching. Take a few illustrations. 

Among the advertisements which ap- 
peared in Pittsburgh newspapers recently 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 59 

was one which defended the doctrine of the 
inf aUibihty of the Pope and sought to make 
the practice of ascribing inerrancy to an 
individual or an institution appear perfectly 
normal in the common practices of life. An 
analogy between the papacy and the Su- 
preme Court of the United States was 
drawn. It was stated that the Supreme 
Court is infallible. This, of course, is entirely 
contrary to the fact. The Supreme Court is 
final, but not infallible, and there is a vast 
difference between finality and infallibility. 
That great court is the last resort in law, but 
it has never claimed to be infallible. Indeed, 
it practically asserts its own fallibility in 
many of its decisions, for often one third of 
its own members criticize the opinion of the 
two thirds, which opinion is the final deci- 
sion. Lawyers outside the court by no means 
regard it as inerrant and freely agree with 
its minority opinion, but all, whether in 
agreement or otherwise, accept its majority 
decision as the last word on that particular 
case. The finality of the Pope is not a 
serious matter; it is his claim to infallibility 



60 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

that causes moral damage. This claim the 
Roman Catholic Church makes for itself, 
teaching American children in its parochial 
school catechism that "to believe the Cath- 
olic Church is to believe God himself," No 
analogy to this arrogant assumption ap- 
pears anywhere in human institutions of 
government which are not despotic. It is 
utterly unfair, then, to ascribe to our great 
federal court of last appeal an attitude of 
legal arrogance which would lead it to pro- 
nounce even its unanimous decisions as 
utterly inerrant and destitute of any possi- 
bility of legal flaw. Now, we contend that 
to advertise to the world that the claim of 
Romanism to infallibility is precisely paral- 
leled by our Supreme Court when there is 
not a vestige of analogy, and to confuse the 
popular mind by a subtle disregard of the 
fundamental distinction between finality 
and infallibility, is to be governed by ex- 
pediency and not by the rule of conscien- 
tious right. 

Take another instance. In the same series 
of advertisements the Roman Catholics 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 61 

make official claim that one of the sons of 
their church, Camillus by name, was the 
founder of the Red Cross. The popular 
mind would immediately conclude that this 
was the great international organization 
which we have always understood was 
founded by Jean Henri Dunant, of Geneva, 
Switzerland, who, moved by the unneces- 
sary suffering which he witnessed at the 
battle of Solferino in 1859, started an agita- 
tion which led to the so-called Geneva Con- 
vention, out of which the Red Cross societies 
grew. This is the Red Cross which Clara 
Barton founded in its American form and 
for which the American people gave so 
generously and so cheerfully during the 
World War. Now, we are told that the real 
originator was an obscure Roman Catholic, 
unknown to the general encyclopedias, Uv- 
ing in the latter part of the sixteenth century, 
who established an organization for the care 
of the sick and the poor. Professor Schaff, 
who calls attention to this matter and who 
has investigated it thoroughly, says that he 
does not find even in the great German Ro- 



62 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

man Catholic Encyclopedia any intimation 
that Camillus was connected with any kind of 
Red Cross organization, or that he ever made 
any provision for the care of the wounded on 
battle fields. Here, then, is an attempt to 
make a man who did nothing more than 
organize a local sick-benefit order and 
administer local charitable relief funds the 
originator of the present international and 
world-famous Red Cross society. The law 
of expediency is in operation again rather 
than the law of conscientious right. It is 
altogether expedient that the Roman 
Church shall have the credit due the founder 
of the Red Cross, but it is altogether wrong 
that the popular mind should be confused 
and filled with error by statements which 
are not historically sound. 

Take, if you will, the condemnation of the 
Young Men's Christian Association by the 
late Pope Benedict XV, in which he de- 
clared that it was corrupting the morals of 
young men. The popular impression from 
such an oflBcial deliverance was that the 
Association was really damaging the moral 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 63 

life of manhood. This, of course, was not 
the thought of the Pope, for he could not 
have been so woefully misinformed as to 
make such an egregious blunder. What he 
doubtless meant was that the Young Men's 
Christian Association was teaching young 
men to think independently, to study ques- 
tions from the standpoint of conscientious 
determination of what was right, and there- 
fore leading them to discount the claims of 
the Roman Church to speak as the voice of 
God in morals and religion. In that sense 
the Association was and is assuredly chang- 
ing the mental attitude of youth in such a 
way as to ^'corrupt'' pure Romanism. If the 
Pope had said just that, his word would 
have little effect in prejudicing the popular 
mind of uninformed Romanism against the 
4<Y/' That would have been the course of 
truth, but it would not have been expedient 
for Roman Catholicism. 

Now, we maintain that the failure of 
Romanism to put the emphasis on the free 
exercise of the conscience through its failure 
to teach that the insistent question of the 



64 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

moral nature, "Is it right?'' must be heard 
above all inquiries concerning what is ex- 
pedient has led to a lowering of moral stan- 
dards wherever Romanism has held sway. 
There are certain lines of conduct which 
Romanism has approved in the past and 
which it approves to-day to which Protes- 
tantism is most decidedly opposed. Take 
the matter of persecution. Rome has per- 
sistently taught that in the interest of its 
church those who oppose it should be dealt 
with severely. Hence she has a long record 
of persecution. Now, we are well aware of 
the fact that Rome through some of her 
modern appeals to non-Catholics denies any 
torture or death to have been inflicted by 
the authority of the church, and we are also 
aware that Protestantism in the past has at 
times been guilty of persecution, out of 
which fact Romanists make the largest 
capital. But let us examine these points. 
Let us see whether Rome has ever officially 
authorized persecution. 

Cardinal Gibbons in his 'Taith of our 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 65 

Fathers/' an authorized Roman CathoHc 
pubHcation, says that in all of his reading he 
has not found that the Roman Catholic 
Church has officially authorized suffering or 
death in the case of conscientious objectors 
to the Roman Creed. Surely, the Cardinal 
was familiar with the words of Pope Leo X, 
who in his bull condemning Luther in 1520 
declared that the burning of heretics was 
according to the will of the Holy Spirit. He 
must have known that Pope Innocent III 
in 1215 officially instituted the Inquisition, 
that Pope Sextus IV sanctioned the Spanish 
Inquisition, that Pope Paul IV was at the 
head of the Roman Inquisition. Victor 
Duruy, the French historian, in his chapter 
on '^The Catholic Restoration," credits four 
great Popes — Paul III, Paul IV, Pius V, and 
Sixtus V — with saving Italy to Roman 
Catholicism after it had lost one half of its 
empire through the Reformation. He says: 
''As individuals were executed, likewise 
books were burned. These means obstinately 
pursued were successful. Roman Catholi- 
cism was saved in the peninsula, but at what 



66 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

a price !''^ But when Cardinal Gibbons comes 
to the Spanish Inquisition he protects the 
church by holding Spanish royalty, and not 
the Roman Church, responsible for that 
refinement of cruelty. He seems, however, 
to forget that church and state were 
most perfectly united in those days and 
whatever the state did, especially for the 
promotion of religion, is that for which the 
church must bear its full share of responsi- 
bility. If Rome did not approve the 
cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, she 
should at least have openly and positively 
denounced them, but do we find any 
Pope condemning the Spanish king for 
those cruelties as Ambrose condemned the 
cruelties of Theodosius in the fourth cen- 
tury.? If the Roman Catholic Church in the 
sixteenth century was the same true church 
of Christ that existed in the fourth century, 
why did not the reigning Pope rise and 
openly condemn the royal inquisitor and 
say, as did Ambrose, "If you imitate David 



^ Puruy's General History of the World, Thomas Y. Crowell 
& Co., publishers. Review of Reviews. Vol. ii, p. 328. 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 67 

in crime, imitate him in repentance"? When 
it comes to the massacre of Saint Barthol- 
omew's Day Cardinal Gibbons has another 
way of excusing the Roman Catholic 
Church. He says that the reason the Pope 
caused a Te Deum to be sung when he heard 
of the slaughter of the Protestants on that 
awful night in Paris was because he thought 
it was simply the overthrow of traitors who 
had been plotting the life of the rightful 
ruler, and the Pope ordered a song of praise 
in recognition of the triumph of loyalty over 
treason! But the Cardinal did not explain 
how it happened that in addition to the 
song of praise which the Pope ordered he 
also required that a medal be struck off 
having on one side the image of the Pope 
and on the other a representation of the 
destroying angel, with the words, ''Massacre 
of the Huguenots." We have no desire to 
hold humane and kind-hearted Roman 
Catholics responsible to-day for what their 
ecclesiastical ancestors did in darker ages 
gone, but we do hold them responsible for 
failing to acknowledge the colossal crime 



68 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

which the church committed and for at- 
tempting to so explain away the plain facts 
of history as to make it appear that Rome 
was perfectly guiltless of persecuting her 
opponents even unto death. We are forced 
to the conclusion that the reason why her 
apologists do not make complete acknowl- 
edgment of her grievous fault and confess 
that the church sinned and sinned most 
shamefully, is that she still holds that if it 
should appear that the church again needed 
such measures to defend herself, she would 
be justified, even in this enlightened age, in 
resorting to similar practice. When we hear 
one of her apologists saying three centuries 
after the Inquisition that ''Neither church 
nor state, which are bound together upon 
the basis of divine law, recognizes toler- 
ance," and when Joseph Hergenrother, 
trusted member of the Vatican and author- 
ized Roman Catholic historian, says, "The 
authorization of every form of worship is a 
grave injustice in purely Catholic countries 
like Spain and South America,'' then we 
have reason to fear that Rome has not yet 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 69 

repudiated her former faith in the eflSciency 
and moral rectitude of persecution. If 
authorization of differing forms of worship 
is a "'grave injustice'' in Roman Cathohc 
countries, then why may she not use the 
strong hand of the law to exclude non- 
Catholics who worship God according to the 
dictates of their own conscience? Indeed, 
we are not left to inference here. Another 
defender, Granderath, says: "The principle 
that she possesses the power of outward 
punishment the church naturally cannot 
surrender. Meanwhile, though she holds 
fast her principle, in applying it she takes 
account of the conditions of the time."^ If 
this be correct, perhaps those who insist 
that the Roman Catholic Church is utterly 
un-American, since she does not grant the 
right of every man to worship God according 
to the dictates of his own conscience, are 
not as rabid on the subject as we have often 
supposed. 

But what about Protestant persecutions.? 

^ Sacerdotalism in the Nineteenth Century, Henry C. Sheldon, 
p. 36. Eaton & Mains. 



70 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

As stated above, we make no attempt to 
deny the historical facts nor apologize in any- 
way for them. We insist that wherever and 
whenever Protestantism undertook to pro- 
mote its doctrines or advance its enterprises 
by means of persecution, it sinned with a 
high hand against humanity and God. This, 
however, we have to say for Protestantism, 
that whenever she has practiced persecution 
she has stultified herself. She has had no 
theory which has been fundamental to her 
claims as a genuine Christian Church which 
has supported any of her persecuting prac- 
tices. Luther insisted on the right of private 
judgment and direct access to God. He 
also insisted that "'it is contrary to the will 
of the Spirit that heretics should be 
burned." If, therefore, he favored the perse- 
cution of the Jews, as is claimed, he was in- 
consistent with himself and acted in flat 
contradiction of the Protestantism for which 
he stood. The Puritans of New England, 
not the Pilgrim Fathers, persecuted the 
witches and Roger Williams because they 
still held to the anti-Protestant theory of 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 71 

the right of the church to use the temporal 
power to enforce its doctrinal beliefs. The 
Puritans were not purged of the poison of 
high-church Anglicanism when they came to 
America. Anglicanism had never utterly 
broken with the Romish theory. Its quarrel 
has not been with the Roman theory so 
much as with the Roman application of that 
theory. Such a theory led the Protestant 
Puritans to act inconsistently with their own 
Protestant principles. As Protestantism 
purges herseK of every vestige of the Roman 
theory and comes to regard the church 
simply a means to an end, holding that the 
end is the absorption of the spirit and ethical 
power of Jesus in individuals and in society, 
in that proportion does persecution come to 
be abhorrent to the Protestant mind and 
practically impossible of practice. Thus is 
it that true Protestantism has rebuked the 
partial Protestantism of John Calvin. He it 
is who has been called "The Protestant 
Pope'' and whose severity of administration 
in Geneva led to the saying, "Many more 
tears have been shed under Calvin than 



72 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

were ever shed over him." Calvin sanctioned 
the execution of one Michael Servetus, who, 
by the way, was a patron of a Roman 
Catholic archbishop for twenty years, and 
whom Roman Catholicism was ready to 
convict on the very evidence which John 
Calvin furnished against him. Servetus, 
however, escaped from his jailer and avoided 
Roman Catholic execution for his heresy by 
a very narrow margin. Then he came to 
Geneva. Calvin accomplished what Rome 
tried to do and could not. We have no 
apology whatever to make for Calvin any 
more than we would have had for Rome if 
she had succeeded. We are glad that modern 
Protestantism has inscribed over the grave 
of Calvin its own protest against his de- 
ficient Protestantism in the following words: 
^'Huguenots in Geneva, true sons of the 
Reformation, recognizing the benefits of 
Calvin's life and teachings, hereby repudiate 
his crime, which was the crime of his age.'' 
Thus Protestantism reveals a different atti- 
tude toward persecution. We submit that 
the moral standards of Protestantism grow- 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 73 

ing out of a recognition of the right of every 
man to the free exercise of his conscience 
are higher than those which Romanism can 
ever have while she distrusts the moral, as 
she does the intellectual nature of man and 
insists that he cannot be trusted with free 
moral exercise but must be guided by 
authoritative compulsion. 

In conclusion, we look at the general 
moral conduct which Romanism begets in 
her people. It is no slander to say that 
countries in which Romanism is supreme 
have low standards of living. South Amer- 
ica, Mexico, Spain, Austria, and France have 
different standards of moral life from Eng- 
land and America. It cannot be the climate, 
nor the form of government, nor lack of 
opportunity. Rome has had abundant 
chance in these lands, and if submission of 
the conscience to authority rather than its 
free exercise produces a higher type of moral 
life, human conduct in these countries 
should be at its best. On the contrary, 
Roman Catholic countries are sadly illit- 
erate and immoral. In some parts of South 



74 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

America illegitimacy of birth runs as high 
as fifty-seven per cent. This is not due to 
any inherent immorality in the people but 
to the mercenary spirit of Romanism, which 
demands high fees for the marriage cere- 
mony and tolerates moral laxity rather than 
ecclesiastical irregularity. In Spain when 
Rome completely controlled the educational 
system sixty-eight per cent of the population 
was illiterate and in Italy the illiteracy ran 
as high as ninety-three per cent. When the 
Italian government took control illiteracy 
was reduced one half. Rome had her oppor- 
tunity with France. At last the educational 
system was taken from her. She violently 
protested, but her loss of control benefited 
France in the reduction of illiteracy from 
fourteen to five per cent. 

In Mexico Romanism has been in power 
for centuries. Only in recent years has 
Protestant influence been felt in the slightest 
degree. When she had perfect control ninety 
per cent of the population could not read 
nor write, and even to-day Mexico is at 
least sixty per cent illiterate. Indeed, the 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 75 

educational budgets for all Latin America, 
with its eighty-five million people, are not 
much larger, we are told, than for the one 
city of New York, which has less than six 
millions. Illiteracy and immorality go hand 
in hand. No one expects to find the moral 
standards of Christian civilization in South 
America. There libertines and renegades 
from justice expect to find their paradise. 
Why should this be so.'^ Roman Catholicism 
has been in South America longer and has 
had much greater control than has Protes- 
tantism in North America. If she is the 
only authorized Church of Christ on earth 
and her moral teaching is according to the 
mind of God, why, then, has her type of 
Christianity been such a colossal moral 
failure.? The low moral standards of the 
people relate themselves directly to the 
Roman Church. A Protestant bishop, ob- 
serving unusual debauchery on a church 
feast day, inquired as to the particular reli- 
gious festival which was being observed, and 
received the reply, "This is the feast of the 
Holy Ghost'M This type of reUgion lowers 



76 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

moral ideals. A college dean in Brazil wrote, 
"It is with great sadness that I witness the 
steady decrease in the number of unselfish, 
idealistic, genuine men/'^ 

When we come to our own country we 
find that, in spite of the fact that there are 
numbers of Roman Catholic people who 
are individually high-minded and morally 
strong, Romanism as such does not bring to 
us moral uplift. We desire to give Roman 
Catholicism credit for every good she does, 
and we deplore that narrow bigotry which 
can see nothing in her worthy in the least of 
praise, but with all charity we must admit 
the sad fact that the moral forces which are 
struggling to make Jesus King in all realms 
of life do not receive any decided impetus, 
to say the least, when Romanism moves 
into a community. How much of Sabbath 
observance is promoted by Roman Cath- 
olics.? How much strength is given by 
Romanism to the cause of political right- 
eousness when decent citizens fight corrupt 
political organizations and try to elect men, 

* Eric M. North, The Kingdom and the Nations, p. 166. 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 77 

themselves Roman Catholics, who stand for 
high ideals and insist that Roman philan- 
thropic institutions shall be subject to the 
same oflScial scrutiny as that which other 
denominations cheerfully accept? How 
much support does clean government re- 
ceive from Romanism in such a crisis? How 
were movements for moral uplift of young 
people promoted when Simday night enter- 
tainments were provided for them in beer 
gardens, where hquor freely flowed, before 
prohibition came? How much help did the 
cause of prohibition receive from the Roman 
Catholic Church as such? There were 
groups of Roman Cathohcs who helped 
greatly, and noble leaders appeared from 
time to time, but the church officially and 
as a whole hindered rather than helped. A 
Roman Catholic priest, the late Father 
Thomas McLoughlin, of New Rochelle, New 
York, stated publicly in our hearing that 
when Archbishop Ireland asked the Pope 
for his blessing on the Archbishop's Total 
Abstinence Society, the Holy Father said to 
him, "Do you mean that any one who joins 



78 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

your society must give up even the drinking 
of wine?'' ''Yes/' said Ireland, "that is 
what it means." "Then/' said the Pope, "I 
should think a person, for such self-denial, 
should have some kind of a blessing/' Here 
was the papacy's answer to total abstinence. 
It should be an occasion of humiliation to 
Home to realize that in the greatest moral 
reform of the century the Roman Catholic 
Church as such has had no part, and that 
Protestantism is the only ecclesiastical body 
that deserves any credit in effecting the 
legal banishment of this age-long curse. 

We conclude where we began. The moral 
conduct of a people reflects its moral educa- 
tion. Rome teaches that the conscience 
must not be trained to independent action. 
She seeks to bear the moral burdens of her 
people and thus retards their moral growth. 
Our moral heritage lifts the conscience to 
high place and calls upon the individual to 
bear his own moral burden. The church can 
aid him by teaching a sound moral philos- 
ophy and by showing the moral disintegration 
which compliance with the law of expediency 



THE MORAL HERITAGE 79 

brings. To preserve that moral heritage we 
must guard against that Jesuital casuistry 
which justifies the means if the end be 
worthy. Such faulty moral conceptions may 
be ours in spite of our hatred of Jesuitism. 
Dr. Frederick H. Wright, pastor of the 
American Church in Rome and connected 
with a Protestant publishing house, was 
offered a manuscript for publication by an 
Italian of high character and positive 
Protestant convictions. He was a man of 
decided ability and the manuscript con- 
tained beautiful stories for children which 
had high literary worth. On reading it, how- 
ever, it was discovered that it was shot 
through with Jesuitical teaching. It repre- 
sented a little boy protecting his sister in a 
brotherly way, but always with some false- 
hood which resulted in benefit to the girl. 
The Protestant publishers told the author 
they could not print it while it contained 
that Jesuitical moral distortion. The author 
was indignant and insisted that he hated 
Jesuitism and its teachings as much as the 
publishers. He was led at last to see that he 



80 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

was still unconsciously holding to the false 
philosophy of Jesuitism with which he had 
been indoctrinated in youth while he had 
broken utterly with the system. He elim- 
inated the objectionable elements; the book 
published was among the best in the litera- 
ture of moral education, and was intro- 
duced into the government schools by the 
minister of education. 

Thus we see how easily we may hold the 
false moral philosophy of Rome while we 
repudiate Romanism. There must be care- 
ful guarding at this point, for our moral 
heritage will not be maintained by mere 
denunciation of the Roman Catholic Church 
but by a humble and persistent effort, sup- 
ported by divine help, to avoid repetition of 
the moral blunders by which Rome en- 
dangers the moral heritage of Protestantism 
and of free America. 



m 

THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE OF 
PROTESTANTISM 

Text: "For there is one God, and one mediator between God 
and men, the man Christ Jesus." — 1 Timothy 2. 5. 

As the right of private judgment underlies 
the intellectual heritage of Protestantism 
and liberty of conscience the moral heritage, 
so the right of direct access to God is the 
foundation stone of our spiritual heritage. 
If we believe that man can approach God 
directly and that no human intermediary is 
necessary for the fullest intimacy of the soul 
with God; if we take the words of the text 
to mean what they say and permit no inter- 
pretation which would justify a human 
priest coming between the soul and the 
divine Christ, then we have no need of the 
elaborate system of spiritual ministration 
which the Roman Catholic Church provides. 
The confessional, penance, extreme unction, 
purgatory, as well as the Roman attitude 

81 



82 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

toward the use of the Scriptures, all rest 
upon the theory that man needs a human 
intermediary, that he cannot know God 
satisfactorily if he approach him directly, 
and that the divinely appointed way is by 
means of a human priest who is clothed 
with divine authority to pronounce forgive- 
ness of sins and to decide whether or not the 
soul has reached a state of acceptability 
with God. 

Protestantism rejects this view. She holds 
that a man can and should come into direct 
and immediate relation with God — that 
Jesus Christ is the one Mediator, and that 
he is qualified to be such because he is God 
incarnate. Protestantism refuses to believe 
with those who originally promoted the 
worship of the Virgin Mary, that the deity 
of Jesus is so exalted that he cannot enter 
with complete sympathy into perfect fellow- 
ship with weak and sinful men as could 
someone who is entirely human and yet 
occupies a unique relation to the Incarnate 
Christ as did his earthly mother. 

This is one of the fundamental principles 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 83 

of Protestantism, and, like those which we 
have previously considered, requires a cer- 
tain degree of explanation. Because Protes- 
tants reject a human intermediary, we do 
not on that account disregard all human 
agencies in bringing about a direct and 
personal relation of the soul with Christ. 
There are several things in this connection 
which seem to be similar, but which are 
essentially distinct. There is a decided dif- 
ference between introduction and interven- 
tion. When you introduce one person to 
another you bring together those who have 
been strangers. You do not, however, stand 
between them after they are introduced, but 
retire and leave them to relate themselves 
directly to each other. The Protestant 
Church believes in the human agency of 
introduction, and its ministers and laymen 
are busy bringing people to Jesus as Andrew 
brought Peter. They introduce their friends 
to Christ, as without this process of human 
introduction multitudes would never know 
him. But when the introduction has been 
effected, it is the duty of the one so intro- 



84 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

ducing to retire and let the individual intro- 
duced deal directly with his God. The 
Ropaan priest not only introduces, but inter- 
venes. He stands between the soul and 
Christ. It is true that he teaches the com- 
municant to pray more or less directly to 
God, but in the great transactions of re- 
pentance and forgiveness he insists that he 
must remain as the intermediary, dictating 
the penance and informing the penitent 
when he is actually forgiven of God. Not 
only so, but the Romanist confounds inter- 
pretation with intervention. Protestants 
believe that the human minister and layman 
should interpret God to men, hence all the 
agencies of preaching and teaching which 
Protestantism provides, but interpretation 
is a very different thing from intervention. 
The interpreter at best is only a temporary 
expedient and anticipates direct communi- 
cation. Recently there came to Pittsburgh 
a distinguished Japanese. He was the guest 
at dinner on one occasion of a group of 
citizens and Sunday-school workers. After- 
dinner addresses were made in his honor 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 85 

which he could understand only through an 
interpreter, for he could not speak a word of 
English. At length he responded to the 
felicitations of the speakers and spoke for 
haM an hour in Japanese, We could not 
understand a word he said. Then his inter- 
preter arose and for another half hour told 
us what the guest had been saying. That 
interpreter came between us and the dis- 
tinguished visitor and in a sense was for us 
an intermediary. But that mediation was 
only temporary. All present realized that it 
was most unsatisfactory and could never 
remain as a permanent means of communi- 
cation. If we were to have long continued 
and satisfactory fellowship with that man, 
he must either learn to speak English or we 
must learn to speak Japanese. So with the 
interpretation of God to the soul of man by 
the agency of the church. In so far as she 
may interpret God to man and in that way 
stand between God and the soul, Protestant- 
ism insists that the process is wholly tem- 
porary and is intended to operate only until 
the individual learns the medium of com- 



86 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

munication with the Divine; then the in- 
terpreter, in so far as he has been an inter- 
mediary, must retire, else his presence will 
be an impertinence. We repeat that every 
agency of Protestantism which may be cited 
as a parallel to the confessional— personal 
interviews with converts, the private in- 
struction given by class leaders, Sunday- 
school teachers and pastors — ^must be inter- 
preted in the light of the fundamental prin- 
ciple of Protestantism, namely, that the 
human agency operates alone for purposes 
of introduction and interpretation, but 
never in the sense of permanent interven- 
tion. When the man has once found Christ, 
all intermediaries must depart. The agencies 
of the church are useful to him without 
doubt, knowledge of God and his way he 
must seek, and the church is ordained to 
help him there, but all must be regarded as 
merely contributory to that intimate, per- 
sonal fellowship of man with his Maker, of 
the soul with his Saviour which receives 
such rapturous emphasis in the Bible and in 
the literature of the saints. It would have 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 87 

been an insult to have proposed human 
intervention between David and his Divine 
Shepherd in that experience of which he 
sings when the Lord is his Shepherd and he 
knows he cannot want. The earthly life of 
our Lord reveals an intimacy of personal 
fellowship with his disciples which suffered 
no breakage when those men came to know 
him as their Lord and their God. Paul deals 
directly with Jesus and is evermore seeking 
to lead the people of his time into a fellow- 
ship just as intimate and just as directly 
personal as was his. The saints of primitive 
Christianity would have scorned the sugges- 
tion of a priestly intermediary. Listen to 
Clement of Alexandria, a Christian Father 
of the second century whom Jerome pro- 
nounced the most learned of men. He pre- 
sents in his great hymn "Shepherd of Tender 
Youth'' the thought of direct access to God 
which the early church counted so precious. 
He sings: 

'"Thou art the great High Priest; 
Thou hast prepared the feast 
Of heavenly love; 



88 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

While in our mortal pain 
None calls on thee in vain. 
Help thou dost not disdain, 
Help from above." 

Even when we come down to the Dark Ages 
we find the saints who shine as stars in the 
midnight gloom, show that hght comes 
through direct touch with God. In his great 
hymn, "Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts" 
Bernard of Clairvaux speaks the language 
of direct approach of the soul to God: 

"Thy truth unchanged hath ever stood; 
Thou savest those that on thee call; 
To them that seek thee, thou art good. 
To them that find thee, all in all." 

Protestantism insists on this right of 
direct access to God which has yielded such 
precious fruit of spiritual experience and 
conduct and at this point comes into colli- 
sion with Roman Catholicism. In making 
this contention we are dealing with a vital 
principle and not simply with a particular 
form of religious devotion which might be a 
matter of personal taste or educational 
preference. Much is being said to-day con- 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 89 

cerning the evil of religious intolerance and 
with the condemnation of it we are in 
heartiest accord. A local newspaper quoted 
recently on its front page the words of one 
Napoleon Hill, who says, "If we must give 
expression to intolerance, we should not 
speak it, but write it — write it on the sands 
near the water's edge.'' He says that in- 
tolerance is the greatest sin, and he hopes 
that when he gets to heaven he will find no 
Jews nor Gentiles, no Catholics nor Prot- 
estants, but only human souls and brothers. 
Mr. Hill and his friends might charge us 
with intolerance in speaking as we do on 
these disputed themes, but our contention 
is that in so speaking we are working by 
another method toward the same goal of 
broad charity which he seeks. To get rid of 
intolerance we must eradicate the roots as 
well as trim the branches. In insisting on 
the right of direct approach to God we main- 
tain that we are seeking to destroy a tap- 
root of intolerance. Intolerance is promoted 
not only by those who practice it but by 
those who suffer it. Intolerance, hke other 



90 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

crimes of despotism, has gone when its 
victims have refused to suffer it. Let us ask 
why have men endured it? The answer is, 
because of certain advantages which they 
felt the promoters of intolerance could alone 
provide, and so great were those advantages 
that men were willing to pay the price 
which the intolerant exacted. This is true 
to-day in industrial realms. There are 
workingmen who have endured the intol- 
erance of certain capitalists because only by 
such endurance could they keep their posi- 
tions and have steady work. They felt the 
possession of steady employment was worth 
the price of submission to intolerance. The 
same is true if we reverse the situation. 
Labor organizations when in control of a 
situation have often been intolerant to 
employers, and many a manufacturer or 
builder has smarted beneath the require- 
ment of labor leaders, yet has endured the 
smart rather than suffer a strike which 
would have crippled his business. The point 
is that many advantages accrue to men at 
the hand of the intolerant, and for the sake 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 91 

of those advantages people submit to radical 
wrongs. One way to correct this intolerable 
situation is to remove those advantages 
from the hand of the intolerant. Once let 
men see that they have no advantage to 
gain in submitting to the lash of despotism, 
and they will rise and refuse to suffer further. 
Now, Rome has always had it in her 
power to promote and maintain intoler- 
ance. She has always taught her people 
that it is of immense spiritual advantage to 
obey her commands. She has thoroughly 
imbued the minds of her communicants 
with the idea that the power of spiritual 
life and death was in her hand. She 
has insisted that she had power to reach 
into the invisible and lay hold on God and 
that she could reach into the invisible of a 
man's soul and control his spiritual relations 
with God. This is the meaning of the con- 
fessional. The priest hears the confession 
and determines what type of penance will 
bring the soul a state of acceptability with 
God. When the penance has been performed 
acceptably to the priest, then he professes to 



92 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

be able to reach into the invisible and ascer- 
tain how God feels toward the soul of that 
penitent, and his priestly absolution or 
refusal to absolve is the direct message 
from God whom he alone has been able to 
reach. Extreme unction rests on the same 
assumption of spiritual advantage to the 
individual. The priest hurries to the death- 
bed of a communicant, not to pray with him 
and give him spiritual comfort only, but to 
do something for him in relation to God and 
to the unseen world which he claims cannot 
possibly be done for him outside the Roman 
Catholic Church. So when a man dies, the 
same hold on the unseen in its relation to 
the departed soul is asserted by Rome. She 
still has her hand on the spiritual life of the 
individual, and until friends of the departed 
provide certain masses those friends are told 
that the departed cannot come to a satis- 
factory spiritual state even though his spirit 
has passed from earth. Now, here is a series 
of tremendous advantages which Rome pro- 
fesses to give to her obedient children. Once 
let them believe that she holds these spir- 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 93 

itual advantages in her hand, and men will 
endure extreme intolerance rather than 
imperil them. The religious life is, after all, 
most precious to men, and they do so highly 
esteem spiritual good, in spite of all seeming 
indiflference and even hostility to it, that 
they have revealed a readiness to pay almost 
any price for what they believed to be 
genuine religious advantage. Here is Rome's 
strangle hold on her people. They have 
been taught in the most impressionable 
years of life that she, and she only, has in her 
hand the power of spiritual life and death. 
Believing that she can save their souls or 
condemn them to everlasting death, men 
who exercise independence regarding every 
other question, will bow their souls at this 
shrine of spiritual autocracy, and Roman 
Catholics, on whom their church has but a 
slender hold during health and life, will, on 
the approach of death, return to what they 
conceive to be the ark of spiritual safety. 
Often a pastor has been surprised to find 
Roman Catholics who attended his church 
services, evidently preferring them to their 



94 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

own, go back to Romanism when death 
drew near and seek the ministrations of a 
priest, lest their soul should suflFer as it 
crossed the dark valley. 

We submit, then, that if Rome had always 
shown the spirit of kindness and had been 
most tender-hearted in her dealing with 
friend and foe; if she had utterly eschewed 
persecution and repudiated all disposition to 
use the temporal power for the promotion of 
her religious enterprises, even then she 
would be a despotism, though a very benev- 
olent one, and thus out of sympathy with 
our American institutions. But when we 
know that Rome has by her oflBcial deliver- 
ances and her authorized acts displayed the 
spirit of an intolerant despot , justifying her- 
self on the ground that she must show no 
leniency toward those whom she conceives 
to be wrong, then we see that intolerance 
with her is not an accident nor the practice 
of a few unauthorized agents who have 
falsely spoken in her name, but belongs to 
the very essence of her teaching concerning 
the relation of the soul to God. 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 95 

Now, we have reached the very core of 
Protestantism. The ground of Luther's 
protest was spiritual. He had personally 
come into direct relation to God through 
justifying faith. He found he had no need of 
the elaborate system of intervention be- 
tween God and the soul which was practiced 
by Rome. In the light of this new experience 
he went forth and protested against many 
abuses in conduct which were practiced in 
the name of the church and in which protest 
he expected to be supported by the Pope 
himself. It was an occasion of great grief 
when he found that he had to resist the 
Pope. He had been an ardent advocate of 
the papacy. He says, "I was then a monk 
and a mad papist, ready to murder any 
person who denied obedience to the Pope." 
His position of protest was taken only after 
deep heart-searching and at great cost to 
himself. He says, ^'O with what anxiety and 
labor, with what searching of the Scriptures 
have I justified myself in conscience in 
standing up alone against the Pope!" It was 
a great blow to him to discover that the 



96 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

moral irregularities against which he pro- 
tested were countenanced by the Pope, but 
still greater to find that the papal teaching 
concerning the souFs relation to God was 
contrary to the Scriptures, to the experience 
of the saints, and to the teaching of the 
primitive church. 

Now, this assumption of spiritual control, 
like her position on the right of private 
judgment and the liberty of conscience, is 
one which Rome must hold if she shall 
maintain her system. Let her cease for a 
generation, even a decade, to teach that she 
has control of the souls of men; let her 
tolerate independent and free approach of 
the soul to God and the consequent lack of 
necessity for penance and extreme unction; 
let her teach, as does Protestantism, that 
the spiritual ministrations of the church are 
only for the edification and comfort of the 
souls of men, but do not represent an actual 
power to determine the spiritual status of 
the individual, and the Roman system as it 
now stands will disintegrate. 

Since, then, this doctrine of spiritual con- 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 97 

trol through authorized intervention is so 
vital to Romanism, let us see on what 
grounds it rests. There are three realms in 
which Rome professes to find justification. 
The first of these is the realm of Scripture. 
She quotes certain passages from the New 
Testament and interprets them as giving 
her this spiritual authority. The first and 
chief of these are the passages in Matthew 
and in John concerning "binding" and 
"'loosing" and the remission of sins. Jesus 
said to his disciples, "Whatsoever ye shall 
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and 
whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be 
loosed in heaven." Again, on the first Easter 
Sunday evening, when Jesus met with his 
disciples, he said, "Whose soever sins ye 
remit, they are remitted unto them; and 
whose soever sins ye retain, they are re- 
tained." Now, the Roman Catholic inter- 
pretation of these words is that Jesus was 
here committing to the Roman Church as 
it now stands the exclusive right to pro- 
nounce forgiveness of sins. The claim, of 
course, is that Jesus was giving to the 



98 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

apostles as the official head of the church 
this right which was to be passed on to their 
successors, and as Rome claims exclusive 
rights in apostolic succession, she maintains 
that she forgives sin to-day by authority 
divinely conferred on her at that time. 
Of course, there is here that same logical 
leap for which Rome is famous by which she 
ignores all rules of evidence and substitutes 
unwarranted assumption for proof. There 
is not the remotest evidence that Jesus had 
a church organization of any kind in mind 
when he thus spoke, and it is a wild flight of 
the imagination to suppose that he was 
prophetically looking at the Roman Cath- 
olic Church as it is to-day and was singling 
it out from all the other churches of Chris- 
tendom, with their vast numbers and record 
of at least equal Christliness, and saying 
that this particular denomination of Chris- 
tians, and this alone, should have the right 
to forgive sins. If Rome interpreted these 
words to mean that all Christian churches 
were meant by Jesus, we would not accept 
such a view, but when she says that the 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 99 

Master meant to single her out and give to 
her the exclusive privilege of forgiving sin, 
the proposition is so utterly untenable that, 
had it not gathered to itself a certain aroma 
of sanctity, it would long since have been 
rejected as sacrilegious or positively ridicu- 
lous. There is even no evidence that Jesus 
was speaking to the future church at all. 
He was speaking only to his followers con- 
cerning their right to represent him in the 
organization of a church. *^Binding'' and 
"'loosing'' were familiar terms in such con- 
nection. But even if they were here author- 
ized to become the oflScial teachers of his 
doctrine and organizers of his church, there 
is no intimation that he would pass over to 
them his own forgiving prerogative. Fur- 
ther, it is reasonable to conclude that, as 
they were charged with the founding of the 
first church organization, their commission 
related to that particular task and would 
expire with their death. In any case, it is 
against all reason to believe that Jesus was 
here passing over to a little group of his 
followers his own right to deal directly with 



100 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

the souls of men. If that were what he 
meant, the apostles certainly did not so 
understand him, for they were continually 
referring penitent persons directly to him 
for the settlement of the soul's problems. 
Peter on the Day of Pentecost tells the 
inquirers to repent and be converted in 
order that their sins may be blotted out. 
He does not assume to blot them out. Paul 
tells the Philippian jailer to believe on 
Jesus and he will be saved. He does not 
pretend to personally retain or remit sins. 
He is not intervening between the jailer and 
Christ, but simply pointing out the way of 
salvation, as any layman might do. John 
says that if we confess our sins, he is faithful 
and just to forgive us our sins. The plain 
meaning is that anyone may confess directly 
to Christ and find forgiveness. No one 
would ever have thought of reading into it 
the implication of an intervening priest ex- 
cept for the purpose of maintaining a theory. 
Indeed, the whole spirit of the New Testa- 
ment is a protest against the thought of a 
human intermediary. The system of priestly 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 101 

intervention in Old Testament times is sup- 
planted ''by the new and living way." 
Christ is now the great High Priest. Men 
may come boldly to the throne of grace. The 
Epistle to the Hebrews proclaims in nearly 
every line the doctrine of the priesthood of 
believers. For a human priest to stand be- 
tween the believer and Christ is to copy 
the Old Testament and to revive the sys- 
tem which has been completely ''done 
away." "And every priest standeth daily 
ministering and offering oftentimes the same 
sacrifices, which can never take away sins: 
but this man, after he had offered one 
sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the 
right hand of God. . . . For by one offering 
he hath perfected forever them that are 
sanctified." Hence follows the comforting 
exhortation which is made possible only by 
an utter elimination from the gospel plan of 
the ministrations of an intervening human 
priest. Listen to its emphasis of the personal 
right of the individual to come directly to 
God: "Having therefore, brethren, bold- 
ness to enter into the holiest by the blood of 



102 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

Jesus, by a new and living way which he 
hath consecrated for us, through the veil, 
that is to say his flesh; and having an high 
priest over the house of God; let us draw 
near with a true heart in full assurance of 
faith." It would be difficult to conceive of 
words more plainly declaring the complete 
rejection of the priestly system of human 
intervention in the souFs discovery of and 
fellowship with its divine Lord. If those men 
who heard Jesus say, '^Whose soever sins ye 
remit, they are remitted" had understood 
him to mean that they were to establish a 
system of priestly intervention such as 
Romanism maintains to-day, then the New 
Testament as we have it would never have 
been written and a church founded by 
apostles so believing would have denied the 
Epistle to the Hebrews a place in the canon. 
Moreover, any interpretation of the 
Master's words which makes them to mean 
that only eleven men and their successors 
should have the right to pronounce divine 
forgiveness, is in direct opposition to the 
spirit the Master continually displayed. He 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 103 

was evermore condemning a rigid literalness 
and a mechanical formalism. He positively 
refused to be shut up in spiritual matters to 
any ecclesiastical system. The form was 
nothing with him; the substance was every- 
thing. He was constantly finding men and 
women outside ecclesiastical regularity who 
were better than those who were within. He 
insisted that strict observance of prescribed 
ceremonialism could not save a man. He 
said he would not be able to recognize many 
who had prophesied in his name and in his 
name cast out devils, because their spirit 
was not right. How, then, can we think of 
such a Teacher passing over for all time to a 
little group of men an authority in the for- 
giveness of sins which he himself would no 
longer exercise, so that no one could be for- 
given, however worthy, unless he had the 
seal of this little group or its authorized 
successors.? If the Roman interpretation is 
true, we are shut up to the conviction that 
Jesus actually divested himseK of the for- 
giving prerogative and bestowed it on those 
few apostles and their successors. If Rome 



104 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

once granted that Jesus might forgive sins 
without using the apostles and the Roman 
Church, then her whole system would fall, 
for she would have to admit that in Protes- 
tantism Jesus might forgive men directly 
even though in Romanism he forgives them 
only through priestly intervention. This 
would remove all the exclusiveness which 
belongs to the Roman system and would 
cause it to disintegrate. We maintain, then, 
that there is not the least warrant in the 
New Testament for the supposition that 
Jesus, when he spoke to the apostles about 
remitting and retaining sins, intended to 
give even them the exclusive right of for- 
giveness much less that he intended to con- 
fine that right to the Roman Church or to 
any other particular church for its exclusive 
exercise. 

But the theological aspect of this assump- 
tion is equally opposed to the Roman 
theory. The accepted theological view of 
God represents him as a Spirit dealing with 
the spirits of men. God is regarded as 
onamiscifptt. He searches the reins and the 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 105 

hearts of men. Here, then, comes a penitent; 
he feels the burden of sm and seeks forgive- 
ness. When he comes to the priest his 
sincerity has to be put to the test. The 
priest professes no supernatural penetration 
into the soul of the suppliant. The penance 
imposed is the test. If the penitent performs 
the penance required, the priest concludes 
that he is sincere and then pronounces him 
forgiven. Here two elements enter which 
do not accord with Christian theology. 
There is the element of time. Why should 
God, who knows the human heart and who 
is a Father, delay his pardon of a repentant 
soul until a priest has had time to put that 
penitent to a test.^^ The test is required only 
because the priest is human and thus devoid 
of omniscience which the great High Priest 
possesses. Why should God be supposed to 
restrain his fatherly eagerness to forgive his 
repentant son simply to accommodate the 
slowly moving priest.? But there is also the 
element of fallibility. The priest does not 
know whether the communicant is sincere 
or not. He tests him by penance. That test 



106 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

may not discover the real status of the soul. 
Many a man has done penance whose heart 
is not sincere. The priest, however, cannot 
discover this and is liable to be deceived. 
But acting on his best judgment he thinks 
the suppliant genuine and says "I absolve 
thee.'" Now, as a matter of fact, he is not 
absolved. The priest and the church have 
forgiven him, but God has not done so. The 
whole matter then reverts back to the direct 
relation of the soul to God. Where the 
penitent is sincere and the priest has not 
made a mistake, God forgives and the priest 
is unnecessary. Where the priest is mistaken 
and pronounces absolution, the man has not 
been forgiven and the church has uninten- 
tionally, but nevertheless in reality, pro- 
nounced a lie in the name of God. In order 
to make priestcraft, at its best, harmonize 
with theology, we must eliminate its dis- 
tinctively Christian view of the Divine and 
look upon God as possessed of those pagan 
characteristics which made him subject to 
human manipulation and attributed to him 
the weaknesses of faulty man. 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 107 

But when we come to the rational an- 
alogies by which Roman Catholic teachers 
attempt to defend the practice of priestly 
intervention, we find that they are equally 
unsatisfactory. We quote again from Father 
Conway's Paulist Lectures to non-Catholics 
since they represent the most plausible in- 
terpretations of Romanism. The failure of 
Rome to promote direct dealing of the soul 
with God is justified by citation of cases in 
common life where the indirect method is 
employed. A case is supposed where the 
President of the United States should learn 
of irregularities in the Philippine Islands 
and commission twelve men, clothed with 
full judicial powers, to go over and inves- 
tigate. In this case those men would be 
authorized to act for the President, and 
those whom they would adjudge guilty 
would be recognized as guilty by the United 
States; likewise those acquitted would be 
declared innocent just as truly as if the 
President himseK were there in person. Now, 
the fallacy of this argument lies in the use 
of an imperfect analogy. The analogy be- 



108 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

tween the President of the United States 
and the Divine Being fails at the point of 
supernatural powers. The President sends 
a commission to investigate and act because 
he is ignorant of the situation and cannot 
leave the White House to personally attend 
to the matter. God needs no such commis- 
sioners as the priests presume to be, since he 
himseK knows all the facts better than any- 
ecclesiastical commissioners, and he is pres- 
ent, dealing directly with the individual, 
when any question of guilt or innocence 
arises. 

Again, argument for priestly intervention 
is made by an analogy of the army general 
and the private soldier. The question is 
asked, "Why does not a soldier report for 
duty directly to the commanding general.?" 
The answer is that it is not the duty of a 
commanding general to receive individual 
reports of private soldiers. No general was 
ever appointed to that high office and then 
assigned to camp-gate duty, where he might 
check up the return of soldiers who might 
have been off on leave. That is the task of 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 109 

a sergeant or some other subordinate officer. 
But the forgiveness of sins is not a subor- 
dinate task, it is the divine prerogative of 
the Almighty, and for him to assign such a 
task to a subordinate would be for him to 
surrender his high office of Judge and 
Saviour. The analogy utterly fails when it 
compares God's exclusive right of forgive- 
ness with an inferior task to which a high 
official could not give himself without 
dereliction of duty. 

Likewise the analogy fails between a 
governor and a tax-collector for the same 
reason. Father Conway asks, "Why does 
not a citizen pay his taxes directly to the 
governor of his State.?^" The plain answer 
is because the governor is elected to be a 
governor and not to be a tax-collector. When 
the citizens elect a man as governor they 
have not the remotest suspicion that he will 
devote his time to collecting taxes. That is 
no part of the gubernatorial function. He 
will, of course, have general supervision of 
the financial transactions of the State, but 
the voters expect him to appoint a local 



110 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

internal revenue collector and not perform 
the duties of that oflBce himself. The Ro- 
manist does not seem to be able to see that 
forgiveness of sins is a superior and not a 
subordinate task. The opponents of Jesus 
raised at least once a righteous inquiry when 
they asked, "Who can forgive sins but God 
alone.?'' And Jesus accepted their challenge 
when he forgave sins as evidence of his 
deity. For him to delegate this exclusively 
divine function to a human being would not 
be the assignment of a subordinate task to 
a subordinate officer, but it would be the 
transference of a divine prerogative to a 
mere man. 

Now the spiritual heritage of Protestant- 
ism is a firm belief in the direct access of the 
soul to God and in forgiveness of sins as an 
attribute of God which he cannot delegate 
to a man. Consequently, Protestantism has 
no place in its creed or theology for a human 
intermediary. It opposes spiritual media- 
tion not only because it believes it utterly 
contrary to the New Testament, but also 
because of the practical evils which it 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 111 

generates. The whole trend of Christian 
progress is away from the idea of an inter- 
mediary. Superstition is a relic of the theory 
of intervention. Omens and signs and doc- 
trines of devils are fostered by the notion 
that there are subordinate intermediaries 
between God and human life. Popular 
superstitions grow on this root. People 
hesitate to look at the moon over the left 
shoulder lest it indicate impending evil. The 
midnight wail of a house dog is regarded as 
an advance messenger announcing the ap- 
proach of death. Fortune-tellers and the 
spiritualistic frauds who "peep and mutter'' 
are all of the nature of intermediate forces 
between the Source of spiritual power and 
the human soul. How grandly these 
wretched superstitions are swept away as 
soon as we stress the glorious doctrine of 
Jesus that God as loving Father comes into 
closest and most immediate relation with 
the individual. "Even the hairs of your 
head are all numbered." "Your Father 
knoweth that ye have need of all these 
things.'' "Lo! I am with you alway." "I 



112 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

will not leave you comfortless; I will come 
to you/' "Let not your heart be troubled, 
neither let it be afraid/' These sublime 
statements of the immediacy and imma- 
nence of God banish the superstitious folly 
that God would use the moon or the house 
dog or the spiritualistic faker as a medium 
of communication between himself and his 
loved child. The loving mother will not per- 
mit a competent and sympathetic nurse to 
come between her and her child. How much 
less will God, whose love passeth the love 
of women, tolerate the intervention of 
superstitious and erratic media between 
himseK and his own! 

Not only does superstition follow on the 
heels of spiritual intervention, but an un- 
wholesome secrecy is also developed. Rome 
has a standing quarrel with freemasonry, 
and at least one ground of its opposition is 
that masonry requires secrecy of its mem- 
bers. But Rome seals the lips of all her 
priests and excuses them in withholding 
even knowledge of crime which the state 
should possess. Freemasonry is not a con- 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 113 

fessional in any sense, and her secrets are 
not those of human conduct and law viola- 
tion such as Rome receives and carefully 
conceals, but those of mere regulations of an 
organization which anyone may know who 
becomes a member. The confession of 
wrongdoing in the ear of a church which 
promises never to divulge, does not lead 
toward that openness and moral illumina- 
tion for which Jesus was always contending. 
The Master insisted that truth leads to the 
light and that there is nothing secret that 
shall not be made manifest. The secretive 
spirit, the disposition to enshroud life in 
dark mystery, the hatred of public view and 
the love of sheltering dark where shrewd 
manipulations may be effected without fear 
of pitiless publicity are not productive of a 
sound morality nor a healthy spiritual life. 
Protestantism seeks the light and disparages 
all agencies of darkness. Her insistence on 
the right of every man to know, on the right 
of every conscience to assert itself and call 
to its bar all processes of life, and its open 
profession of allegiance with Him who is the 



114 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

Light of this world and with whom is no 
darkness at all, make it utterly unsym- 
pathetic with the kind of secrecy which 
Roman Catholicism begets and fosters. 
Take a concrete case. Gipsy Smith in a 
recent evangelistic sermon told of an 
awakened conscience with which he was 
called to deal. In an after meeting he found 
a woman in great spiritual agony. He told 
her there must be some wrong which she was 
not willing to acknowledge. She said there 
was, and then told him that she had been a 
false witness in a famous court case wherein 
her testimony had ruined the reputation of 
an innocent man. The Gipsy told her that 
she must make acknowledgment and restitu- 
tion. She said she could not bear the shame 
it would involve. But he said to her, "What 
am I to do? You have told me; I cannot 
retain a guilty silence and let this innocent 
man go on bearing a moral reproach/' At 
last through prayer and conference she was 
brought to a state of willingness and then 
to a state of personal peace. The acknowl- 
edgment was made, the man was publicly 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 115 

and legally acquitted of blame, and a victory 
for righteousness recorded in heaven and on 
earth. Now, suppose that confession had 
been made to a Roman Catholic priest, what 
would have resulted? That woman, while 
she might have suflFered penance and re- 
ceived at length announcement of Rome's 
forgiveness, might still have left that moral 
stigma on the innocent man and the weight 
of injustice would have rested on the courts 
and the community. The priest could never 
have assumed the high level of moral recti- 
tude and have declared, as did the Gipsy, 
"I cannot remain silent and share your 
guilty secret." It is not necessary to say 
that the moral progress of the world de- 
mands that everywhere the attitude of the 
Gipsy prevail and that the course officially 
required of the priest makes for every kind 
of retrogression. This heritage of light and 
moral rectitude which despises that moral 
shielding which begets moral weaklings, 
must be maintained and promoted if we are 
ever to rid the world of its social, commer- 
cial, industrial, political, and religious 



116 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

wrongs and pave a path of spiritual sunlight 
for Him who is the brightness of his 
Father's glory. 

We close this series of discourses with an 
emphasis of the constructive note which we 
have tried to sound all through. We can 
only drive out darkness with light and only 
truthful affirmations can drive out noisome 
negations. Over against Rome's elaborate 
system of intervention we desire to place in 
clear light the glorious directness of an 
experimentally authenticated gospel. Each 
Roman Catholic institution or sacrament 
founded on the principle of spiritual media- 
tion has its counterpart in Protestantism 
founded on the principle of direct approach 
to God. Look at these. 

Here is the confessional. Many Romanists 
find spiritual comfort therein which is not 
to be condemned, but over against the con- 
fessional and whatever peace it may bring 
we place the rich experience of justification 
by faith through direct access to God by 
Jesus Christ, which Protestantism has pro- 
claimed and experienced through the cen- 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 117 

turies. Charles Wesley came to justifying 
faith when he came to know Christ through 
full surrender of himself directly to the 
Saviour and went out with a new song in his 
heart which God had directly placed there 
and which prompted him to half a centiu'y 
of singing which has charmed the hearts of 
millions since his day. The hymnody of the 
confessional is certainly not large, to say 
the least. In other words, men have not 
found so rich and joyous a religious expe- 
rience through confession to an earthly 
priest, obedience to his demands for pen- 
ance, and the reception of his forgiving 
pronouncement, "I absolve thee," as they 
have through direct approach to God and 
simple faith in Jesus Christ the great high 
priest. The exaggerated figures which 
Charles Wesley uses in a stanza said to have 
been written to describe his joy in forgiveness 
through justifying faith stand out in contrast 
with the almost stoical reception of forgive- 
ness through the confessional. Wesley sings : 

"Fully justified I, I rode on the sky, 
Nor envied Elijah his seat. 



118 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

My soul mounted higher than a chariot of fire. 
The moon, it was under my feet." 

Or take the doctrine of penance. Protes- 
tantism knows nothing of penance chiefly 
because it rejects the artificial view of good 
works which Rome maintains. We never 
set men to doing things simply to test their 
sincerity, and therefore we have no place 
for pilgrimages and artificial mortifications 
of the flesh which have no value in them- 
selves. We believe that worthy conduct is 
so valuable and there is so little time for the 
doing of all that should be done, that we 
never ask men to perform the intrinsically 
useless tasks of penance. We believe that 
genuine faith in Jesus which brings a man 
to immediate relation with his Lord will 
stimulate in him a desire to imitate his 
Master in going about doing good. We are 
concerned with the spirit in which a man 
does good deeds. We count it of little worth 
for him to give and toil and suffer simply 
that he may earn the approval of the 
church, if in his soul there be no moving 
impulse to fellowship with his loving Lord 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 119 

in the supreme task of building his king- 
dom. We therefore tend to promote a more 
joyous practice of the art of Christian hving. 
Christian hving comes to be a joyous pro- 
cedure. The Protestant learns not only to 
sing with Paul and Silas when in the agonies 
of persecution, but he cultivates the more 
natural joy which comes from viewing all 
life as a vast field of service wherein he 
walks in personal and immediate fellowship 
with his Master day by day as a colaborer 
with God. 

The Bible thus becomes to the Protestant 
a handbook of life to which he goes each day, 
not as to a catechism to learn stiff doctrines, 
but as to a fountain from which he may take 
refreshing draughts of the water of life. The 
Bible is a devotional book to him. He com- 
mits a passage to memory, not that he may 
recite it in a confirmation class or a con- 
fessional, but that he may '^meditate on it 
day and night'' for the strengthening of his 
new life in Christ which came when he be- 
came a new creature through justifying 
faith. Hence he must have a copy of the 



120 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

Bible for himself. He must read, mark, 
learn, and inwardly digest its truth; and 
while he does not despise the instruction 
which the church and the Bible class may 
give, yet that instruction will be of little 
value unless he be a constant and devo- 
tional reader of the Book. Now, while 
Roman Catholics in this country are per- 
mitted to read the Bible, it is no use denying 
that the personal perusal of the Book has 
never been encouraged by Rome, and in 
multitudes of instances has been positively 
prohibited. There is nothing in all Roman- 
ism corresponding to the British or the 
American Bible Society, and the activities 
of these agencies for the encouragement of 
individual reading of the Scriptures is de- 
cidedly opposed by the Roman Catholic 
Church. Protestantism offers the open 
Bible, without note or comment, and has 
been enabled to raise up a church of Bible 
readers. Its saints are not found handling a 
cross nor counting beads, but reading and 
meditating upon the inspired Word of God 
until their experience voices itself in the 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 121 

language of Holy Writ, "'O how love I thy 
law ! . . . Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, 
and a light unto my path/' 

Nor has Protestantism need of the sacra- 
ment of extreme unction. This is not simply 
a means of spiritual comfort to the dying, 
it is an insistence on the need of the priestly 
intermediary for the souFs triumphant exit 
from this world. The Protestant minister 
goes also to the deathbed, but he goes only 
to pray for and with the dying and help 
them to find Christ as an immediate Pres- 
ence to the soul. If they have already found 
him, he need only administer spiritual com- 
fort, and in any case the Protestant pastor 
regards the ministrations at the deathbed of 
far less value than those bestowed in health 
when the mind is unclouded by the confu- 
sion of physical break-down. The priest is 
more eager for deathbed ministration than 
the Protestant, not because more sym- 
pathetic, but because of the demands of his 
theory. That theory insists that serious 
spiritual loss will ensue to saint as well as 
sinner unless the priest can intervene be- 



122 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

tween that soul and God just before it 
passes into eternity. The Protestant is 
eager that every man shall know Christ 
personally before that hour, and then he 
needs no one but his Divine Redeemer as 
the night of death draws nigh. 

Protestantism gives to the world its 
triumphant deathbeds, not because of any 
priestly ministrations, but because it leads its 
people into a conscious, personal acquaint- 
ance with Him who has abolished death 
and brought life and immortality to light 
through the gospel. It teaches its men to so 
live that when death draws nigh they may 
have direct access to the Great High Priest 
whether or not there be any earthly friend 
near by to pray. It teaches them to sing: 

"Thy stroke, O death, terror of the world, I hail; 
*Twill snap my bonds and set me free. 
Free to wing the vasty realms of being. 
Inbreathe the freshest air of Kfe 
And bask me in the sunlight of eternal day." 

Its all-suflSciency for life as well as death is 
Jesus, whom the soul may reach directly 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 123 

and immediately. Thus Charles Wesley- 
sings as he approaches the dark valley: 

"In age and feebleness extreme. 
Who shall a helpless worm redeem? 
Jesus, my only joy thou art. 
Strength of my failing flesh and heart. 
O let me catch a smile from thee 
And drop into eternity." 

Thus, discarding all necessity for an inter- 
vening priest at death, Protestantism cer- 
tainly has no need for any such after pas- 
sage into the other world. Purgatory is 
the attempt of the Roman Church to hold 
the souls of men in its power after they 
have left this world. It is perhaps the 
least reasonable of all Rome's doctrines. 
To suppose that God defers all direct 
dealing with the souls of men, even after 
they have passed into the other world, until 
a human priest has adjusted certain trans- 
actions with the friends of the departed 
on this side the grave would be absurd if 
it were not so serious. How contradictory 
that a soul passed into God's unseen world 
must await a message which God is sup- 



124 OUR PROTEiSTANT HERITAGE 

posed to send back to an earthly priest 
before it can come to direct dealings with 
the Saviour! If there should be such a 
place as purgatory, surely God would be 
nearer to it than a priest living on this 
earth. What reason can justify belief in 
the theory that God, to whom the soul has 
gone, cannot deal with that soul directly 
and dispose of his case until human priests 
on this side have received word from God, 
acted in his stead and sent word back again 
to that soul in the unseen ? Nothing but the 
exigencies of a theory, or the purpose to 
retain control over men in this life by pre- 
tending to keep that hold even after death, 
could ever justify reasonable men in believ- 
ing such a preposterous and contradictory 
doctrine. How far removed is the New 
Testament conception! There we read, 
"Absent from the body, present with the 
Lord''; "To-day shalt thou be with me in 
paradise" — not purgatory. Surely, that 
dying thief had no human intermediary. 
Only the Saviour and himself were in that 
transaction, and though he was deep dyed 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 125 

in sin the Master's forgiveness and infusion 
of new life sufficed to save him, and there is 
not the remotest suggestion of purgatorial 
purging but immediate entrance into par- 
adise. It is this view of death which 
Protestantism maintains. It is this saving 
triumph over the fear of death which 
Protestantism has been instrumental in 
promoting. Thus Wesley, the Protestant, 
says as he draws near the close of Ufe, "The 
best of all is, God is with us." Thus Cook- 
man, the Protestant, sings as the sun goes 
down, "Sweeping through the gates, washed 
in the blood of the Lamb." Thus Moody, 
the Protestant, replies when asked how it is 
with him in the hour of death, "Earth is 
receding, heaven is opening; God is calling, 
I am going home." These men needed no 
extreme unction, they needed no purgatory; 
they had done no penance, but their lives 
had blossomed with good deeds and their 
only confessional was the place of prayer 
where they did "acknowledge and bewail 
their manifold sins and wickedness" directly 
to Him who is able to save unto the utter- 



126 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

most all that come unto God by him, for 
they had found the one Mediator between 
God and man, the Man Christ Jesus. 

The need of Protestantism to-day is that 
she shall understand the importance to the 
world of her own promotion and that she 
shall openly defend herself. It is far easier 
to criticize Protestantism than it is to 
criticize Romanism. The Roman Church 
severely rebukes all her critics. For this 
reason she has scarcely any within her own 
ranks, and she succeeds in silencing many 
critics without. As a consequence, many of 
the critics of the Roman system are those 
whose courage has degenerated into a kind 
of rabid rashness, and as they have but little 
reputation for intellectual poise to lose, they 
say many things which a more reputable 
but equally strong antagonist of Rome 
would hesitate to utter. Many a man, there- 
fore, who sees the folly and un-Americanism 
of the Roman system, hesitates to speak be- 
cause he prizes so highly his own reputation 
for moral sanity and brotherliness. Not 
only so, but Protestantism has a genius for 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 127 

independent criticism and finds great satis- 
faction in pointing out her own faults. While 
this is wholesome, it may lead us to excess. 
Like any other good it is subject to per- 
version. Consequently the deficiencies of 
Protestantism receive excessive advertising 
while her fundamental excellencies are often 
obscured. Just reflect on the condemnation 
which Protestantism received at the hand 
of Billy Sunday. Much of the criticism of 
individuals and churches was deserved, but 
the condemnation as a whole was a wild 
exaggeration. The critic himself was a loyal 
Protestant, and if he had once trained his 
guns of fiery invective on the faults of 
Romanism, her ecclesiastical structure 
would have looked like the cathedral at 
Rheims after its desecration. But he did not 
do so. It was often remarked that the 
Roman Catholic Church was the only thing 
he did not criticize. His ministry in New 
York city was received by multitudes of 
Romanists. They, of course, heard his ring- 
ing gospel messages, but they also heard his 
condemnations of Protestant ministers and 



128 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

church members, and without a word of 
suggestion that Rome was equally incon- 
sistent, they could only conclude that 
Protestantism was very much of a failure 
to say the least. Lesser evangelists have 
pursued the same course. Nearly all mag- 
azine articles and public addresses breathe 
the free air of Protestant inquiry and criti- 
cism and the total impression left on Roman 
Catholics who never hear their own church 
criticized within its own ranks is that 
Protestantism is a broken reed. Moreover, 
there has been a fatuous notion in the minds 
of many popular speakers and writers that 
the best way to cure Rome's wrongs is to 
conciliate her, and Protestant ministers 
have often gone out of their way to laud 
Romanism and set her up as an example to 
Protestant churches. But Rome only makes 
these mistaken brethren her dupes. She 
publishes their conciliating remarks in her 
attacks on Protestantism and by implica- 
tion holds these men up to ridicule for stay- 
ing in a church which is so far below the 
heights which Romanism has reached! It 



THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE 129 

is futile to try to conciliate Rome, just as it 
is useless and wicked to indulge in vitupera- 
tion and slander. What is needed is that we 
shall speak the truth with sanity and with 
soberness, that we forsake the temporizing 
policy of timidity whereby we have con- 
demned Protestantism with faint praise; 
that we honestly acknowledge the indebted- 
ness of American freedom of mind, of con- 
science and of religion to Protestantism and 
soberly see the inherent hostility of official 
Romanism to such liberty; that we cease 
extenuating Rome's low ideals of life on the 
ground that she reaches thereby the rougher 
elements of society and that we plant our 
feet firmly on the truth that it takes the 
highest to really reach the lowest; that we 
recognize the endeavor of Protestantism to 
build the kingdom of God on earth, in social, 
industrial, and political realms, while we see 
that Rome is chiefly occupied with building 
her own institution and getting men into 
another world, and that, finally, while we 
shall cease to '"see red'' whenever Romanism 
is mentioned, we shall come to see that 



130 OUR PROTESTANT HERITAGE 

Protestantism is the only form of Chris- 
tianity which enables us to "see white'' as 
we search among the dark problems of the 
day for genuine solution. 

We have no desire to discount whatever 
is good in Romanism. Her belief in the deity 
of Jesus, the inspiration of the Scriptures, 
and the atoning work of the Saviour is to 
be commended. We differ in the interpre- 
tations of these truths. We have tried in 
this series to build rather than to pull down, 
and we have sought in our condemnation of 
what we feel to be wrong to follow the 
poet's vision of the "Vaster" and the 
"builder," praying the Great Head of the 
church that soon the whole dream may 
come to be true — 

"I look, aside the mist has rolled, 
The waster seems the builder too; 
Upspringing from the ruined old 
I see the new! 

" Twas but the ruin of the bad. 
The wasting of the wrong and ill; 
Whatever of good the old time had. 
Is living still." 



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